Sustainability, Vol. 10, Pages 3592: Towards Efficient Resource Utilization Exploiting Collaboration between HPF and 5G Enabled Energy Management Controllers in Smart Homes (Sustainability)

The influence of Information Communication and Technology (ICT) in power systems necessitates Smart Grid (SG) with monitoring and real-time control of electricity consumption. In SG, huge requests are generated from the smart homes in residential sector. Thus, researchers have proposed cloud based centralized and fog based semi-centralized computing systems for such requests. The cloud, unlike the fog system, has virtually infinite computing resources; however, in the cloud, system delay is the challenge for real-time applications. The prominent features of fog are; awareness of location, low latency, wired and wireless connectivity. In this paper, the impact of longer delay of cloud in SG applications is addressed. We proposed a cloud-fog based system for efficient processing of requests coming from the smart homes, their quick response and ultimately reduced cost. Each smart home is provided with a 5G based Home Energy Management Controller (HEMC). Then, the 5G-HEMC communicates with the High Performance Fog (HPF). The HPFs are capable of processing energy consumers’ huge requests. Virtual Machines (VMs) are installed on physical systems (HPFs) to entertain the requests using First Come First Service (FCFS) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithms along with Optimized Response Time Policy (ORTP) for the selection of potential HPF for efficient processing of the requests with maximum resource utilization. It is analysed that size and number of virtual resources affect the performance of the computing system. In the proposed system model, micro grids are introduced in the vicinity of energy consumers for uninterrupted and cost optimized power supply. The impact of the number of VMs on the performance of HPFs is analysed with extensive simulations with three scenarios.