Real-Time Demand Response Using NB-IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) already connects billions of devices and keeps growing exponentially. These devices are designed to be integrated with industrial machines, home appliances, and infrastructures. One such use case is to build a smart grid management system that relies on demand-response techniques to control the appliances automatically so that the power can be distributed optimally. The mission-critical smart grid communications require secure, reliable, two-way communicable, and latency bounded connections between the management system and the electrical appliances. To realize these, cellular technology is arguably the most feasible solution. 3GPP has already released the narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) standards as the low-power dense-area coverage IoT cellular solution. In this article, we present an NB-IoT system to monitor and control the connected electrical appliances in a smart grid network. The platform is also capable of configuring the network dynamically. We assess the latency performance for our solution using the commercially available Orange network in Belgium. It is observed that NB-IoT enabled devices can be controlled and monitored with a maximum latency less than 8 s in the deep-indoor environment and within 2 s for the outdoor environment.