Communication Technologies for Interoperable Smart Microgrids in Urban Energy Community: A Broad Review of the State of the Art, Challenges, and Research Perspectives

In modern urban energy communities, diverse natured loads (homes, schools, hospitals, malls, etc.) are situated in the same locality and have self-electricity generation/management facilities. The power systems of these individual buildings are called smart microgrids. Usually, their self-electricity generation is based on renewable energy sources, which are uncertain due to their environmental dependency. So, the consistency of self-energy generation throughout the day is not guaranteed; thus, the dependency on the central utility grid is continued. To solve this, researchers have recently started working on interoperable smart microgrids (ISMs) for urban communities. Here, a central monitoring and control station captures the energy generation/demand information of each microgrid and analyzes the availability/requirement, thereby executing the energy transactions among these ISMs. Such local energy exchanges among the ISMs reduce the issues with uncertain renewable energy and the dependency on the utility grid. To establish such useful ISMs, a well-established communication mechanism has to be adopted. In this view, this paper first reviews various state-of-the-art developments related to smart grids and then provides extensive insights into communication standards and technologies, issues/challenges, and future research perspectives for ISM implementation. Finally, a discussion is presented on advanced wireless technology, called LoRa (Long Range), and a modern architecture using the LoRa technology to establish a communication network for ISMs is proposed.