## 4 Technology
### Communication  
The integration of information and communication is crucial, in order to realize the future-oriented energy system. This integration has to be done on an Internet-based infrastructure, able to provide access to energy information in a simple, quick and economic way. This is because energy providers, either centralized or decentralized, need a constant flow of updates, regarding the energy demands, in order to provide the precise amount of energy needed. The timing of these updates may vary from seconds to hours, depending on the management level of the grid. Optimization of energy consumption is based on integrated and near-real-time electronic communication between producers and loads on all levels of the grid. This infrastructure will also be profitable for consumers. In fact, intelligent and inter-connected end devices will be able to optimize their power consumption and they will provide customers the possibility to monitor their consumption values, even remotely. This will allow customers who want to optimize their electricity usage to analyze their behaviour, to spot possible anomalies and to take appropriate countermeasures [20]. In this section, we will analyze some examples of integration between ICT technologies and the energy network. These examples are based on very common communication protocols and software architectures:  
* The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is an application-layer networking protocol for clock synchronization between computer systems. It has been developed by [PERSON] _et al._[21] in 1989 and the current reference implementation is version 4, which has been proposed as a standard by IETF [22]. * The Service Oriented Architecture is a software architecture that defines the interactions between computer systems in form of interoperable and distributed services, defined through a description language. * Web Services are the most common implementation of the SOA. According to the W3C, \"a Web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL)\" [23]. An example of integration between the energy network and ICT networking technologies is a solution proposed by [PERSON] _et al._[24]. In modern energy distribution systems, generation and demand need to be always matched in real-time. This means that the modern grid is a real-time distributed system, thus it needs a precise synchronization between its devices. Modern grid infrastructures realize several functions, such as protection testing, fault detection, load balancing and scheduling through synchronization. The authors propose a solution based on the implementation of the Network Time Protocol (NTP) over 802.11 networks along with an optimisation technique to reduce the energy usage of a common Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) synchronisation protocol [24]. Another example focusing on integration is provided by [PERSON] _et al._[25], where authors investigate the consumer energy consumption of Beijing, in order to perform statistical analysis aimed at recognizing city events and dynamics. Thus, they realized a two-layer architecture (see Figure 6) to realize an application framework based on the urban sensing for supporting the optimization of energy consumption. Through the proposed middleware ODP, utilities could get more intelligence and value from the data that will be collected from existing USI (Urban Sensing Infrastructure) and other smart grid devices, like AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure, see Section 4.2). The Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides concepts particularly suitable for an energy distribution network. In fact, it decouples functionalities from implementation, integrating them through message exchange protocols in a dedicated Service Bus. Moreover, it is not needed to develop interfaces between every application: each application only needs to be interfaced to the integration platform [15].