# Internet of Things Applications as Energy Internet in Smart Grids and Smart Environments
## 2 IoT-Based Applications for Smart Grids  
The IoT is one of the most recent emerging communication technologies, which is composed of data acquisition, processing, transmission, and storage stages to provide a more robust and efficient communication system. The information societies desire an immediate of the latest state of technologies concerned with their life to control energy sources, electric vehicles (EVs), and homeappliances and observe consumption rates of electricity, water, and gas. The IoT technology has several advantages compared to other communication technologies. One of them is its ability to provide several specific communication and network structures for complex and heterogeneous communication scenarios. Another is that it can provide a more efficient use of devices by decreasing power consumption and cost. Furthermore, service providers also need ICT technologies for ensuring service sustainability. The recent developments acquired on the IoT have encouraged operators, service providers, and developers to utilize IoT technology in smart grids and other smart environments, such as smart cities, smart buildings, smart homes, and so on [20; 21; 22; 23; 24; 25; 26]. In this section, we have comprehensively analyzed communication and network structures of IoT technologies. A number of novel communication technologies containing a low power wide area network (LPWAN), LTE, LTE-A, and narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) have been proposed, as well as ZigBee and Bluetooth low energy (BLE) technologies. The major improvement of these technologies is a long-range communication opportunity over unlicensed bands. The most important LPWAN technologies are LoRa, provided by Semtech, Ultra Narrow Band (UNB) improved by SigFox, Weightless, improved by Neul, LTE machine-type communications (LTE-M), and NB-IoT, provided by 3 GPP [27; 28; 29; 30]. The detailed comparison schemes for the popular communication technologies that are used in IoT are illustrated in Figure 1a,b. As can be seen from the schemes, it is obvious that the LPWAN presents remarkable advantages in terms of cost, coverage area, number of station requirements, range, and power consumption. These outstanding advantages of LPWAN make it convenient for end-user IoT applications with low cost, low power consumption, and increased coverage areas. The LoRa and UNB are the most widely utilized LPWAN technologies, due to exploiting unlicensed frequency bands. The LoRaWAN, which is designed as a specific protocol for LoRa, supports star and cellular topologies. The end-devices connected to the network over gateways are run in call mode for reducing energy consumption [29; 30]. The development of this technology is essentially based on two layers;the physical (PHY) layer and media access control (MAC) layer [31; 32]. While the chirp spread spectrum (CSS) modulation method is utilized in the PHY layer, LoRaWAN protocol is designed for the MAC layer. Due to these advantages, LoRa has been widely preferred in several metering, monitoring, and management applications. As mentioned before, another developing technology is UNB, whichis widely utilized in smart meters (SMs) and home appliances, due to its low-power end device supporting advantage. The UNB adopts cellular technology running in either sub-GHz frequencies with BPSK modulation or differential BPSK (D-BPSK) modulations at 868/902 MHz frequencies. It can support 400 channels by splitting the spectrum into sub-channels [30; 31]. Contrary to LoRa and SigFox, 3 GPP has focused on IoT machine-type communication (MTC) technologies operating in the licensed cellular frequency band. The first IoT technology provided by 3 GPP was LTE-M in Release 12. After the LTE-M, a new technology called NB-IoT was introduced in Release 13.