Long-range and cost-effective Communication Architecture for Rural MG Clusters’ Control and Management: an Ethiopian case study

Even though the emergence and development of the Microgrid (MG) concept are based on distributed control and autonomy, their control and management strategies still require some level of machine-to-machine (M2M) communication to achieve optimum performance. Nevertheless, and despite the importance, the design and analysis of communication systems are sometimes overlooked in MG-related studies. In the current work, we investigate the feasibility and practicality of integrating a multi-layer wireless communication system into a mini-grid cluster architecture that is intended to electrify three villages in an underprivileged
area in Ethiopia. Protocol selections and network architecture designs are carefully explained and justified as necessary. In our proposal, and due to security concerns, local communication solutions are recommended while cloudbased systems are also considered due to their favorable features. In addition, detailed latency and reliability analysis, along with experimental results, are provided to validate the proposed infrastructure.