Title
An Electricity Price-Aware Open-Source Smart Socket for the Internet of Energy.
Abstract
The Internet of Energy (IoE) represents a novel paradigm where electrical power systems work cooperatively with smart devices to increase the visibility of energy consumption and create safer, cleaner and sustainable energy systems. The implementation of IoE services involves the use of multiple components, like embedded systems, power electronics or sensors, which are an essential part of the infrastructure dedicated to the generation and distribution energy and the one required by the final consumer. This article focuses on the latter and presents a smart socket system that collects the information about energy price and makes use of sensors and actuators to optimize home energy consumption according to the user preferences. Specifically, this article provides three main novel contributions. First, what to our knowledge is the first hardware prototype that manages in a practical real-world scenario the price values obtained from a public electricity operator is presented. The second contribution is related to the definition of a novel wireless sensor network communications protocol based on Wi-Fi that allows for creating an easy-to-deploy smart plug system that self-organizes and auto-configures to collect the sensed data, minimizing user intervention. Third, it is provided a thorough description of the design of one of the few open-source smart plug systems, including its communications architecture, the protocols implemented, the main sensing and actuation components and the most relevant pieces of the software. Moreover, with the aim of illustrating the capabilities of the smart plug system, the results of different experiments performed are shown. Such experiments evaluate in real-world scenarios the system's ease of use, its communications range and its performance when using HTTPS. Finally, the economic savings are estimated for different appliances, concluding that, in the practical situation proposed, the smart plug system allows certain energy-demanding appliances to save almost Euro70 per year.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.3390/s17030643
SENSORS
Keywords
Field
DocType
IoT,IoE,smart plug,energy monitoring,electricity-price awareness,home automation,power demand,HEMS
Usability,Electric power system,Home automation,Software,Engineering,Energy consumption,Wireless sensor network,Embedded system,The Internet,Communications protocol
Journal
Volume
Issue
Citations 
17
3.0
14
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.67
14
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Óscar Blanco-Novoa1221.52
Tiago M. Fernández-Caramés222618.31
Paula Fraga-Lamas324119.01
Luis Castedo457773.24