Efficient Routing for Overlay Networks in a Smart Grid Context

In the modern smart grid, prosumers and communities, organized in energy collectives, are showing an increased desire to trade energy directly using different forms of decentralized market models. To support local autonomy and distributed services, decentralized networking, using peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, can be used to facilitate dynamic discovery and establish communication between peers.

When using a modern overlay network based on a Distributed Hash Table (DHT), the performance of the overlay network can be improved by using the physical properties found in the smart grid context. This paper presents an improved network routing model that takes advantage of these properties, to add a location-aware heuristic to the search algorithms of a standard overlay network.

Concepts from complex networks are utilized to improve the average search path and provide a more efficient design over previous solutions. A proof of concept shows that the design results in a more efficient routing model, when used in a smart grid context, compared to a standard uniformly distributed network model.