Nearly a generation ago, during a much milder downturn, contractors and suppliers especially began developing and promoting ‘smart homes’: using wired networks to centrally actuate and manage appliances, climate control, entertainment, and lighting. What made them challenging and expensive to put in—and especially to retrofit and change around—is that these systems are typically wired, which limits their applications and markets.

 

Today there is a renewed interest in controlling the home. The focus is less though on convenience and more on cutting power costs and in doing so reducing emissions and sustaining the electric grid without costly investment in polluting generating plants and ugly distribution systems a.k.a. smart grids.

 

There is an emerging, affordable, and practical solution to managing onsite (home and small business) power use and enabling smart grids, one familiar to most consumers and businesses and that are wireless principally WiFi (News - Alert) networks. The WiFi Alliance, a global non-profit industry association has released report titled “WiFi for the Smart Grid: Mature, Interoperable, Security-Protected Technology for Advanced Utility Management Communications" as well as its recent formalization of a Smart Grid task group.

 

The WiFi for the Smart Grid report details the use of WiFi for smart grid applications in home, neighborhood, and wide area networks. Ten years after its initial introduction to the market, WiFi has proven to be a versatile technology, the report said, performing well as a low-power solution for short range data transmission, as a high-performance network for the digital home, and as a scalable solution to cover large outdoor areas such as campuses and neighborhoods.

 

WiFi has become dominant home wireless networking standard. It is already integrated into home routers, set top boxes, HD TVs, notebook PCs and smart phones. WiFi-enabled thermostats, refrigerators, and washing machines then “make perfect sense” the report said.

 

The Smart Grid communications network will be a heterogeneous network based on many different standards the paper points out. WiFi technology will certainly be part of any future smart grid. WiFi is cost effective, scalable to cover large geographies and many endpoints, and requires no new cabling within the home.

 

Whether as a separate network or integrated into existing home networks, WiFi should be, the paper said, the “primary Home Area Network for the Smart Grid.” There are many mature products based on 802.11 technology that implement large outdoor networks. These networks have been successfully deployed for years and there is broad expertise available to the industry for deploying and maintaining these types of networks. It is more practical, it argues, to reuse these existing technologies for the Smart Grid application than to create a new wireless standard or develop a new ecosystem from scratch.

 

The paper also outlines and stresses key WiFi attributes including:

 

*          Mature, low-cost technology. More than a billion nodes already deployed; WiFi chipset shipments now exceed one million units per day and will grow past one billion units per year by 2011.

 

*          Mechanisms to deliver robust performance in shared-spectrum and noisy RF environments including Listen-before-talk protocol, RF noise awareness and reporting, and received signal strength. Also, it transports all IPv4 and IPv6-based protocols, thereby supporting all IP-based applications.

 

*          One standard that allows implementation of several interoperable performance/power dissipation profiles. Rates ranging from 1 Mbps to 600 Mbps.

 

*          Networks can scale from a single pair of devices to thousands of access points and clients.

 

WiFi is secure based on several years’ experience both on the supplier and the user side with home PCs especially. The paper identifies security protections: link-, network-, and application-level security based on international standards which meet FIPS 140-2 certification and rogue device and intrusion detection tools.

 

“This is an exciting opportunity to build on WiFi's strong base in home and enterprise networking to fully realize the benefits of the Smart Grid,” WiFi Alliance (News - Alert) Executive Director Edgar Figueroa said in a statement. “Our industry has a mature production and certification ecosystem to keep WiFi technology affordable and interoperable. Our members are creating products now to address the entire spectrum of connectivity, from in-home to across town.”

 

In addition to producing the new report, WiFi Alliance has formalized a task group to provide technical expertise to utilities, government officials, and other interested parties on the various properties of WiFi which make it suitable for Smart Grid, and to assess how the long standing WiFi CERTIFIED testing program may be extended to support Smart Grid devices and applications.

 

The WiFi CERTIFIED program tests devices based on the 802.11 family of standards for interoperability and quality. It provides a widely-recognized designation of interoperability and quality.

 

The WiFi Alliance is also a participating member of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Smart Grid Interoperability Panel. SGIP is a forum for stakeholders to participate in the ongoing coordination, acceleration and harmonization of standards development for the smart grid. The SGIP reviews use cases, identifies requirements, coordinates and accelerates smart grid testing and certification, and proposes action plans for achieving these goals.

 

“There is no question that WiFi is going to play a large role in smart energy management solutions,” Craig J. Mathias, a principal with the mobile and wireless advisory firm Farpoint Group, said in a statement. “The technology is well-established in millions of home networks around the world and the industry continues to innovate on both low-power and large-network solutions that will dramatically expand its importance in a wide variety of Smart Grid applications.”