SMILAY: An Information Flow Management Framework for MicroGrid Applications in Smart Cities

The micro grid is a small intelligent electricity network (power grid) that uses computer technology to optimize production, distribution, and consumption and can operate independently by managing "intelligently" its own expenses and production capacity. The main objective is to ensure the best user perception without any human monitoring based on effective needs and better use. To do so, we need a control mechanism to drive the microgrid. In this article, we propose a new easily deployable framework called SMILAY based on two key ideas: a hierarchical architecture and a service-specific overlay network (SSON). SMILAY works by deploying SMIBOXES over all the buildings of the microgrid and interconnecting them through an overlay network. A multicriteria selection mechanism is used to design a small set of SMIBOXES in charge of the information flow management. Our simulation results show that the proposed approach provides fast convergence time performance of the information flow compared to other related approaches using minimum network capacity.