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    25 September 2015, Volume 13 Issue 3
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    The whole issue of ZTE Communications September 2015, Vol. 13 No. 3
    2015, 13(3):  0. 
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    Special Topic
    Recent Advances in Smart Grid
    Kun Yang, Yingfei Dong
    2015, 13(3):  1-1. 
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    A smart grid is the next-generation electric grid that enables efficient, intelligent, and economical power generation as well as reliable, safe, robust transmission and distribution. It uses modern information and communications technologies, such as advanced sensing, monitoring and processing technology, and high-speed bi-directional communications and networking. In recent years, the smart grid has attracted significant attentions from academics, industry, equipment manufacturers, and service providers. Developing the smart grid has become a global trend due to the immense potential benefits including enhanced reliability and resilience, higher operational efficiency, more efficient energy consumption, and better power quality.

    We received strong responses to this call for papers on Recent Advances in Smart Grid from universities, research institutes, and industry. Following a peer-review process, we have selected five papers for inclusion in this special issue.

    The first paper,“Theory Study and Application of the BP-ANN Method for Power Grid Short-Term Load Forecasting,”aims at improving the accuracy of short-term load forecasting in a power system. To this end, the authors propose a new predictive model using the BP-ANN-based method from a neural network. A theoretical background and numerical results are also given in this paper.

    The second paper,“A Solution-Based Analysis of Attack Vectors on Smart Home Systems,”first presents a short survey of privacy and security in the broader smartworld context and then analyzes and ranks attack vectors or entry points into a smart home system and propose solutions to remedy or diminish the risk of compromised security or privacy.

    In the third paper,“Secure Communication Networks in the Advanced Metering Infrastructure of Smart Grid,”the authors propose a security protocol for the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) with two-way communication in a smart grid. The work proposes a security protocol specifically for the AMI to meet the security requirements.

    The methods for efficient network resource management are proposed in the fourth paper,“Reliable Remote Relay Protection in Smart Grid.”The authors discuss simple backup solutions in the previous work. They also focus on improving the system reliability by exploring known power system information and minimizing the chances of false trips of important remote relays. Moreover, in order to further improve the system reliability, the authors investigate the peer-to-peer protection approaches to address the single point of failure of centralized control center.

    The authors of the final paper,“Experimental Study on Cloud-Computing-Based Electric Power SCADA System,”discuss the main issues in applying private cloud architecture to power system control and propose a professional private cloud solution to integrate the electric power SCADA system. In particular, experimental study has been conducted.

    We would also take this opportunity to thank all the authors, reviewers, and editors in ZTE involved in this special issue.
    Theory Study and Application of the BP-ANN Method for Power Grid Short-Term Load Forecasting
    Xia Hua, Gang Zhang, Jiawei Yang, Zhengyuan Li
    2015, 13(3):  2-5.  doi:10.3969/j.issn.1673-5188.2015.03.001
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    Aiming at the low accuracy problem of power system short-term load forecasting by traditional methods, a back-propagation artificial neural network (BP-ANN) based method for short-term load forecasting is presented in this paper. The forecast points are related to prophase adjacent data as well as the periodical long-term historical load data. Then the short-term load forecasting model of Shanxi Power Grid (China) based on BP-ANN method and correlation analysis is established. The simulation model matches well with practical power system load, indicating the BP-ANN method is simple and with higher precision and practicality.
    A Solution-Based Analysis of Attack Vectors on Smart Home Systems
    Andreas Brauchli, Depeng Li
    2015, 13(3):  6-12.  doi:10.3969/j.issn.1673-5188.2015.03.002
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    The development and wider adoption of smart home technology also created an increased requirement for safe and secure smart home environments with guaranteed privacy constraints. In this paper, a short survey of privacy and security in the more broad smart-world context is first presented. The main contribution is then to analyze and rank attack vectors or entry points into a smart home system and propose solutions to remedy or diminish the risk of compromised security or privacy. Further, the usability impacts resulting from the proposed solutions are evaluated. The smart home system used for the analysis in this paper is a digitalSTROM installation, a home-automation solution that is quickly gaining popularity in central Europe, the findings, however, aim to be as solution independent as possible.
    Secure Communication Networks in the Advanced Metering Infrastructure of Smart Grid
    Feng Ye, Yi Qian
    2015, 13(3):  13-20.  doi:10.3969/j.issn.1673-5188.2015.03.003
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    In this paper, a security protocol for the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) in smart grid is proposed. Through the AMI, cus?tomers and the service provider achieve two?way communication. Real?time monitoring and demand response can be applied be?cause of the information exchanged. Since the information contains much privacy of the customer, and the control messages need to be authenticated, security needs to be ensured for the communication in the AMI. Due to the complicated network structure of the AMI, the asymmetric communications, and various security requirements, existing security protocols for other networks can hardly be applied into the AMI directly. Therefore, a security protocol specifically for the AMI to meet the security requirements is proposed. Our proposed security protocol includes initial authentication, secure uplink data aggregation, secure downlink data transmission, and domain secrets update. Compared with existing researches in related areas, our proposed security protocol takes the asymmetric communications of the AMI and various security requirements in smart grid into consideration.
    Reliable Remote Relay Protection in Smart Grid
    Jiapeng Zhang, Yingfei Dong
    2015, 13(3):  21-32.  doi:10.3969/j.issn.1673-5188.2015.03.004
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    As the false trips of remote protection relays are among the main reasons behind cascading blackouts, it is critical to design reliable relay protection. Even though common protection schemes on traditional power systems have been investigated for a few decades, cascading failures in recent years indicate more research needed in this area. Consequently, researchers have proposed agent-based methods on the Smart Grid (SG) to address this issue. However, these existing agent-based methods simply use TCP protocol without considering real-time communication requirements (such as bandwidth and delay). To deal with this issue, several methods for efficient network resource management are proposed. Furthermore, these existing methods do not consider the potential issues in practical communication networks, which may result in delay violation and trigger relay false trips. We have discussed simple backup solutions in the previous work. In this paper, in addition to network efficiency, we focus on improving the system reliability by exploring known power system information and minimizing the chances of false trips of important remote relays, e.g., defining power line priorities based on their importance. Moreover, to further improve the system reliability, we also investigate the peer-to-peer protection approaches to address the single point of failure of centralized control center.
    Experimental Study on Cloud-Computing-Based Electric Power SCADA System
    Yongbo Chen, Jijun Chen, Jiafeng Gan
    2015, 13(3):  33-41.  doi:10.3969/j.issn.1673-5188.2015.03.005
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    With the development of smart grid, the electric power supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system is limited by the traditional IT infrastructure, leading to low resource utilization and poor scalability. Information islands are formed due to poor sys?tem interoperability. The development of innovative applications is limited, and the launching period of new businesses is long. Management costs and risks increase, and equipment utilization declines. To address these issues, a professional private cloud so?lution is introduced to integrate the electric power SCADA system, and conduct experimental study of its applicability, reliability, security, and real time. The experimental results show that the professional private cloud solution is technical and commercial fea?sible, meeting the requirements of the electric power SCADA system.
    Review
    A General SDN-Based IoT Framework with NVF Implementation
    Jie Li, Eitan Altman, Corinne Touati
    2015, 13(3):  42-45.  doi:10.3969/j.issn.1673-5188.2015.03.006
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    The emerging technologies of Internet of Things (IoT), software defined networking (SDN), and network function virtualization (NFV) have great potential for the information service innovation in the cloud and big data era. The architecture models of IoT, SDN with NFV implementation are studied in this paper. A general SDN-based IoT framework with NFV implantation is presented. This framework takes advantages of SDN and NFV and improves IoT architecture.
    Research Paper
    Crawler for Nodes in the Internet of Things
    Xuemeng Li, Yongyi Wang, Fan Shi, Wenchao Jia
    2015, 13(3):  46-50.  doi:10.3969/j.issn.1673-5188.2015.03.009
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    Determining the application and version of nodes in the Internet of Things (IoT) is very important for warning about and managing vulnerabilities in the IoT. This article defines the attributes for determining the application and version of nodes in the IoT. By improving the structure of the Internet web crawler, which obtains raw data from nodes, we can obtain data from nodes in the IoT. We improve on the existing strategy, in which only determinations are stored, by also storing downloaded raw data locally in MongoDB. This stored raw data can be conveniently used to determine application type and node version when a new determination method emerges or when there is a new application type or node version. In such instances, the crawler does not have to scan the Internet again. We show through experimentation that our crawler can crawl the IoT and obtain data necessary for determining the application type and node version.
    An Improved Wireless Sensor Network Routing Algorithm
    Shengmei Luo, Xue Li, Yiai Jin, Zhixin Sun
    2015, 13(3):  51-56.  doi:10.3969/j.issn.1673-5188.2015.03.008
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    High performance with low power consumption is an essential factor in wireless sensor networks (WSN). In order to address the issue on the lifetime and the consumption of nodes in WSNs, an improved ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing (IAODV) algorithm is proposed based on AODV and LAR protocols. This algorithm is a modified on-demand routing algorithm that limits data forwarding in the searching domain, and then chooses the route on basis of hop count and power consumption. The simulation results show that the algorithm can effectively reduce power consumption as well as prolong the network lifetime.
    Fast, Exact and Robust Set Operations on Polyhedrons Using Localized Constructive Solid Geometry Trees
    Ping Lu, Xudong Jiang, Wei Lu, Ran Wei, Bin Sheng
    2015, 13(3):  57-66.  doi:10.3969/j.issn.1673-5188.2015.03.007
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    Regularized Boolean operations have been widely used in 3D modeling systems. However, evaluating Boolean operations may be quite numerically unstable and time consuming, espe?cially for iterated set operations. A novel and unified tech?nique is proposed in this paper for computing single and iter?ated set operations efficiently, robustly and exactly. An adap?tive octree is combined with a nested constructive solid geom?etry (CSG) tree by this technique. The intersection handling is restricted to the cells in the octree where intersection actu?ally occurs. Within those cells, a CSG tree template is in?stanced by the surfaces and the tree is converted to plane?based binary space partitioning (BSP) for set evaluation;More?over, the surface classification is restricted to the cells in the octree where the surfaces only come from a model and are within the bounding?boxes of other polyhedrons. These two ways bring about the efficiency and scalability of the opera?tions, in terms of runtime and memory. As all surfaces in such a cell have the same classification relation, they are clas?sified as a whole. Robustness and exactness are achieved by integrating plane?based geometry representation with adaptive geometry predicate technique in intersection handling, and by applying divide?and?conquer arithmetic on surface classifica?tion. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ap?proach can guarantee the robustness of Boolean computations and runs faster than other existing approaches.