FogGrid: Leveraging Fog Computing for Enhanced Smart Grid Network

The present manuscript concentrates on the application of Fog computing to a Smart Grid Network that comprises of a Distribution Generation System known as a Microgrid. It addresses features and advantages of a smart grid. Two computational methods for on-demand processing based on shared information resources is discussed. Fog Computing acts as an additional layer of computational and/or communication nodes that offload the Cloud backend from multi-tasking while dealing with large amounts of data. Both Fog computing and Cloud computing hierarchical architecture is compared with respect to efficient utilization of resources. To alleviate the advantages of Fog computing, a Fog computing framework based on Intel Edison is proposed. The proposed architecture has been hardware implemented for a microgrid system. The results obtained show the efficacy of Fog Computing for smart grid network in terms of low power consumption, reduced storage requirement and overlay analysis capabilities. Keywords—Cloud; Edge Computing; Fog Computing; Microgrid; Information processing, Intel Edison; Smart Grid