# A Cyber-Physical Approach for Residential Energy Management: Current State and Future Directions
## 5 Communication Network  
Communication is indispensable for Smart Grids and residential energy management. In order to connect metering devices to an application host or service provider, a communication network must be deployed. Inside a household, the home area network is used to provide monitoring and control over energy usage. The communication network carries control data generated by the metering devices and home appliances to the middleware technology in which the post-processing (monitoring, control, comfort analysis, occupancy, and other HEMS applications) is performed. Examples of communication technologies include wire field network IEEE 802.3 family, power line communications (PLC), serial communication RS-232/485, wireless field network (IEEE 802.11 family, IEEE 802.15 family, mobile field network) (GSM-based 2G, CDMA-based 3G, LTE-based 4G, NR-based 5G), and low power network (NarrowBand IoT, LoRa, Sigfox) [76; 134]. Table 5 compares different technologies deployed in the context of smart homes. Wireless technologies have shown to be preferred over wire field technologies, mainly due to their ease of installation and their cost-efficiency and speed capabilities [135]. Figure 9 shows a schematic diagram for HAN. The HAN network carries the control commands from the middleware to the appliances, energy generation, and storage devices, and from the utility to the appliances registered in the gateway. The home gateway serves mainly as an interface between consumers and the outside world. It also ensures a secure communication between the utility and consumers. Middleware technologies can be located in the household domains (as part of the HAN) or in a cloud platform. In this last case, the communication between the home gateway and the cloud server can be carried out over the internet, connecting the neighborhood area and wide area networks. A smart city communication infrastructure must interconnect smart homes and cloud based service technologies handling the smart city big data load. The requirements of this communication infrastructure were detailed in [38]. As it is expected that smart homes produce a considerable amount of data, and the vast majority of smart grid applications are conceived to operate in real-time, e.g., real-time pricing, demand response, demand side management [3], achieving low latency communication is vital for the communication infrastructure. The 5G technologies rise as a potential candidate since they benefit from virtualization-based and software-defined architectures to provide \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline
**Technology** & **Type** & **Standard** & **Distance Covered** & **Data Rate** \\ \hline
2G [13] & Wireless & GSM & 35 km & Low \\
3G [13] & Wireless & UMTS & 35 km & High \\
4G [13] & Wireless & LTE & 35 km & High \\
5G [13] & Wireless & 5G NR & 200–500 m & Very high \\ Bluetooth [43] & Wireless & IEEE 802.15.1 & 100 m & Low \\ EnOcean [43] & Wireless & EnOcean & 30 m & Low \\ Ethernet [43] & Wired & IEEE.802.3 & 100 m & High \\ HomePNA [43] & Wired & HomePNA & 300 m & High \\ IEEE 802.15.3a [43] & Wireless & IEEE 802.15.3 & 10 m & Very high \\ ITU-T G.hn [43] & Wired & ITU-T G.hn & N/A & High \\ MoCA [43] & Wired & MoCA & - & High \\ ONE-NET [43] & Wireless & ONE-NET & 100 m & Low \\ PLC [43] & Wired & Insteon, IEEE P1901 & 1–5 km & High \\ RFID [43] & Wireless & RFID & 200 m & Medium \\ Serial [43] & Wired & RS-232/422/485 & 15–12 km & Low-Medium \\
6 LoWPAN [43] & Wireless & IEEE 802.15.4 & 100 m & Low \\ Wave2M [43] & Wireless & Wave2M & 1 km & Low \\ WiFi [43] & Wireless & IEEE 802.11n/11g/11 ac/11 ax & 50–100 m & Medium-High-Very high \\ ZigBee [43] & Wireless & IEEE 802.15.4, ZigBee (Pro) & 100 m–1000 m & Low \\ Z-Wave [43] & Wireless & Z-Wave & 30 m & Low \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular} Note.: Data rate: Low (\(<\)1 Mbps), Medium (1–100 Mbps), High (100 Mbps–1 Gbps), and Very high (\(<\)1 Gbps).  
\end{table} 
Table 5: Communication technologies deployed for residential energy management.