# Edge Computing for IoT-Enabled Smart Grid: The Future of Energy
## 1 Introduction  
Nowadays, electrical power is the backbone of all modern technologies. According to the forecast, world electricity consumption will increase by nearly 70% in the coming three decades, going from 25 to 42 thousand teravatt-hours by 2050, in which renewables are expected to be the largest source of global electricity, accounting for some 56% of produced electric power such as that presented in Figure 1[1]. Along with the development of science and technology, electricity is produced from different resources. The power grids are synchronously and seamlessly connected to each other to control, monitor and transmit power safely and seamlessly, and to save power consumption. Electricity generation, distribution and transmission are the three key activities of a traditional power grid [2]. The power flow in systems is unidirectional. Electrical energy is generated by power plants such as hydroelectric, coal-fired, nuclear and diesel, etc. Then, the power flow is transmitted through high-voltage transmissions to load management centers. Finally, power flow is delivered to the end consumer through the power distribution system at a lower voltage. A centralized management system is implemented to control and monitor each power grid so that the plant's generated power is sufficient for the demand of the consumer and within the capacity of the power plant. All of these tasks (production, transmission and distribution) are employed by utility providers, which supply electrical energy to consumers through a payment mechanism that is used to recover costs and make a profit. The average price of electric energy consumption has increased significantly period of 1960 to 2021, from 2.6 to 13.19 US cents per kWh [3]. Nowadays, a remarkable amount of electricity is wasted due to inefficient consumer devices, the absence of smart technology, occasional monitoring and communication, and the lack of electricity storage systems [4]. Moreover, the existing grids are experiencing challenges such as security and privacy, reliability, diverse renewable energy sources and increasing demand for energy consumption. The smart grid is an optimal solution to solve these challenges. There are many types of smart sensors, IoT devices, and terminals in the smart grids, such as current leak sensors, temperature sensors, vibration sensors, humidity sensors, video sensors, etc. They are supported by IoT-based smart grids [5]. In recent years, the launch of fifth generation mobile communication (5G) realized the concept of IoT, which allows connecting all things such as devices, software, and humans to each other based on the Internet. A series of smart applications are proposed to serve people, such as intelligent transportation systems, smart agriculture, healthcare, smart cities and smart grids [6]. A smart grid (SG) is a system that enables two-way communication of electricity and data based on communications technologies and advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) to monitor, control and react to unpredictable changes in the power grid [7; 8; 9]. The IoT-based SGs include six major characteristics such as SDN objects, communication protocols, data analytics based on fog, edge and cloud computing technologies, smart sensors, low cost, and information privacy and security [10]. In the power sector, SG is used to make critical decisions such as scheduling of electrical consumption, real-time pricing, self-recovery, energy efficiency usage through automation, two-way communication, high  
Figure 1: The forecast of worldwide electricity consumption, for the period of 2020 to 2050 [1]. speed monitoring and control of devices. These are the major goals of the SG to improve power quality and grid efficiency [11]. The success of cloud computing (CC) for grid management applications has been recognized over the past decades [12; 13]. However, the rapid increase in IoT devices is generating a huge data amount which increases the compute cost and service response time [14].