The Digital Power Network (DPN) is an energy-on-demand approach. In terms of Internet of Things (IoT), it treats the energy itself as a `thing' to be manipulated (in contrast to energy as the `thing's enabler'). The approach is mostly appropriate for energy starving micro-grids with limited capacity, such as a generator for the home while the power grid is down. The process starts with a request of a user (such as, appliance) for energy. Each appliance, energy source or energy storage has an address which is able to communicate its status. A network server, collects all requests and optimizes the energy dissemination based on priority and availability. Energy is then routed in discrete units to each particular address (say air-condition, or, A/C unit). Contrary to packets of data over a computer network whose data bits are characterized by well-behaved voltage and current values at high frequencies, here we deal with energy demands at highvoltage, low-frequency and fluctuating current. For example, turning a motor ON requires 8 times more power than the level needed to maintain a steady states operation. Our approach is seamlessly integrating all energy resources (including alternative sources), energy storage units and the loads since they are but addresses in the network. Optimization of energy requests and the analysis of satisfying these requests is the topic of this paper. Under energy constraints and unlike the current power grid, for example, some energy requests are queued and granted later. While the ultimate goal is to fuse information and energy together through energy digitization, in its simplest form, this micro-grid can be realized by overlaying an auxiliary (communication) network of controllers on top of an energy delivery network and coupling the two through an array of addressable digital power switches.
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Improving Communication through Overlay Detours: Pipe Dream or Actionable Insight?
It has been long observed that communication between a client and a content server using overlay detours may result in substantially better performance than a native path offered by IP routing. Yet the use of detours has been limited to distributed platforms such as Akamai. This paper poses a question - how can clients practically take advantage of overlay detours without modification to content servers (which are obviously outside clients' control)? We have posited elsewhere that the emergence of gigabit-to-the-home access networks would precipitate a new home network appliance, which would maintain permanent presence on the Internet for the users and have general computing and storage capabilities. Given such an appliance, our vision is that Internet users may form cooperatives in which members agree to serve as waypoints points to each other to improve each other's Internet experience. To make detours transparent to the server, we leverage MPTCP, which normally allows a device to communicate with the server on several network interfaces in parallel but we use it to communicate through external waypoint hosts. The waypoints then mimic MPTCP's subflows to the server, making the server oblivious to the overlay detours as long as it supports MPTCP.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1647145
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10088045
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE 38th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1422 to 1431
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDCS.2018.00143
