A modularized and distributed simulation environment for scalability analysis of smart grid ICT infrastructures

Various ICT system architectures for Smart Metering, Demand Side Management and Distributed Energy Generation are currently being evaluated in numerous pilot projects, which analyze the applicability of wireless, wired and powerline technologies for managing decentralized demand and supply components on distribution network level. In order to analyze the scalability of the proposed ICT system architectures, a detailed simulation model and a comparison of different access and inhouse technologies in combination with a variety of traffic engineering approaches is necessary. Depending on the technology and use-cases, the upcoming Machine-to-Machine (M2M) traffic volume leads to an additional load, which can significantly lower the Quality of Service (QoS) of communication networks and affects the reaction rate provided by these network for both Smart Grid application and additional services. To analyze this influence, this paper introduces a distributed simulation environment for investigating the arising traffic volume caused by Smart Grid services in order to enable a detailed network analysis depending on the used technologies. Furthermore, the simulation environment provides the ability to generate large scaled scenarios based on a geographical database, administrate multiple channel models using a revision based repository and combine both features in an automatic, predefined simulation with auto-resolved dependencies using Web Services.