Comments on: What IPV6 Really Means for the Smart Grid

By: Here Come the Open Standard Smart Grid Software Players «

Here Come the Open Standard Smart Grid Software Players « — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 16:09:34 +0000

[...] One of the key indicators that IP and open standards could be the future of the power grid network came a couple weeks ago when Cisco bought up wireless network company Arch Rock, a startup that called itself the first completely open standard networking option for the smart grid (see Why Cisco Could Reach An End to End Smart Grid Network First, on GigaOM Pro, subscription required). Cisco has emphasized an IP smart grid, and specifically one based on the latest IP numbering systems IPV6. [...]

By: Eric

Eric — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 09:19:42 +0000

Actually, as the smartgrid networks are not usually part of the public Internet, they can jump straight to IPv6 on their proprietary networks and skip the migration.

It shows that they can save costs in doing IPv6 now before ISPs and Telcos are doing it.

Thus it shows to Cisco investors that all that money for IPv6 development will start to pay off now, not sometime in the future.

By: Shah Ullah

Shah Ullah — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 03:29:11 +0000

Katie,

This is great coverage, thanks for highlighting advantages of IPv6 that may be confusing at best or misrepresented at worst. — There is a silver lining here though: one thing IPv6 does does very well is allow devices to communicate to each other very efficiently both 1-to-1 across a global network and at the link-local level and also at 1-to-many unicasting. This in turn can lead to more precise and efficient tracking of network devices at the edge: essentially where these smart grid devices with very little embedded software will be most relevant. And since smart meters are all about tracking at the device level, this could be important. So the idea is have the smart-grid devices do very little themselves, but make sure whatever is being done is efficiently tracked on the other side – i.e in the cloud.

On the flipside, if your smartgrid device today was connected to your WiFi router under IPv4 and there was no special software provisioned on the device and network back-end, its difficult for the network back-end to reconcile that device as its globally unique identifier (MAC) gets obfuscated as it’s channeled through the router’s NAT and potentially elsewhere down the road if there is a 3GPP-to-IP conversion process that the bandwidth provider is using (think what WiChorus via Tellabs is doing for next gen LTE).

More technical info here regarding how IPv6 allows for more efficient m2m communications:

http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac123/ac147/archived_issues/ipj_7-2/ipv6_autoconfig.html

Too bad IPv6 is not going to make it in time for the explosion of connected devices in the next few years!