Introduction
India, a unique and a developing country with huge population, provides many opportunities for Greenfield application deployments. One of such applications for India is the Smart Grid for the Electric Utilities. Smart Grid provides smooth and efficient delivery of electricity from suppliers to consumers using two-way digital communication technology to save energy, reduce cost and increase reliability. Smart Grid is being promoted by many governments across the world as a way of addressing the global warming and emergency resilience issues. This article provides the benefits of IPv6 based Smart Grid for India.
What is IPv6?
IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is the next generation protocol for the Internet, the successor to the IPv4. Internet is the most innovative, successful and massive network ever created. IPv6 has been designed to support Internet connectivity for electric switches to super computers. IPv6 suite of protocols help in building the next generation Internet called the Internet of Things wherein every possible devices, machines, appliances, humans and other things would be able to communicate over the Internet.
Why IPv6?
Everything-over-IPv6-over-Everything
IPv6 is a transport protocol for interconnecting heterogeneous physical links (IEEE 802.15.4, IEEE 802.11, Ethernet, WiMAX, Cellular Networks, etc), and can transfer any type of information (Voice, Multimedia, Data, Real-time information etc.). IPv6 can handle any data rates from few octets per day to Gigabits per second.
Unique and Uniform Addressing Mechanism
Everything from a switch to super computer can be addressed uniformly and uniquely with IPv6 while the DNS (Domain Name Service) provides an established human readable naming. This eliminates address and protocol translators/gateways for connecting to the Internet.
