Power line communications (PLC) have been an active research area for many years and it is still the case, mainly because they present economic and technical natural advantages for a wide range of applications using the existing electrical grid as transmission medium. In this paper, the authors provide an update on PLC technologies and their applications in Smart Grids, the main challenges they are currently facing, how they can be addressed, and the current research initiatives.

Metamaterials are widely used as sensors in a large range of applications due to their unusual properties not found in nature. This review’s purpose is to focus on recent metamaterial-based electromagnetic sensors, particularly on the structures that integrate the metamaterials in antenna or transmission lines for their further integration in measurement instruments. The approach followed in the review is to highlight sensitivity and quality factor (Q-factor) as they are crucial parameters in any sensor; the corpus of literature analyzed lead to the finding that the adoption of metamaterials are a key factor in successfully decreasing the size of the structures while maintaining a high Q-factor value and reducing losses. Additionally, a new metamaterial-based sensors’ taxonomy is proposed to classify them into three main categories: frequency-variation sensors, coupling-based sensors and differential sensors. A tabular comparison of the specifications of different sensors provides further insights into their different capabilities and will allow future researchers to efficiently find and compare their prototypes with state-of-the-art devices.

Cosimulation platforms are necessary to study the interactions of complex systems integrated in future smart grids. The Virtual Grid Integration Laboratory (VirGIL) is a modular cosimulation platform designed to study interactions between demand-response (DR) strategies, building comfort, communication networks, and power system operation. This paper presents the coupling of power systems, buildings, communications, and control under a master algorithm. There are two objectives: first, to use a modular architecture for VirGIL, based on the functional mockup interface (FMI), where several different modules can be added, exchanged, and tested; and second, to use a commercial power system simulation platform, familiar to power system operators, such as DIgSILENT PowerFactory. This will help reduce the barriers to the industry for adopting such platforms, investigate and subsequently deploy DR strategies in their daily operation. VirGIL further introduces the integration of the quantized state system (QSS) methods for simulation in this cosimulation platform. Results on how these systems interact using a real network and consumption data are also presented.

Power line communication has recently attracted the attention of energy companies as a useful and natural technology for building the advanced metering infrastructure. In this context, device language message specification/companion specification for energy metering (DLMS/COSEM) is an increasingly popular standardised application protocol for communication between utilities and their customers. This study analyses the communication performance that can be expected when using the power line communication technology, powerline intelligent metering evolution (PRIME), to send DLMS/COSEM messages. Physical phenomena – such as background and impulsive noise sources, channel attenuation and multi‐path effect – are taken into account during the first step in the evaluation of this technology's communication performance in the physical layer. This metric is then used in upper layers to compute the packet error rate. An analysis is carried out at the application layer in terms of expected latency in different communication environments. Several simulations are performed in a European low‐voltage topology to compute the number of metres that can be read within 15 min. These simulations were carried out using MATLAB and OMNeT++ software.

In this study, the authors present a dielectric-resonator-based sensor to characterize liquids. The sensor is based on a dielectric resonator (DR) fed by a slot-coupling mechanism in the ground plane of a microstrip transmission line (TL). The obtained device is a fully passive sensor that a radiofrequency (RF) signal can interrogate. A small hole was drilled on the DR surface to allocate a drop of the liquid under test (LUT); as a consequence, the resonant frequency of the sensor will depend on the electromagnetic characteristics of the LUT. The device is modeled both with an equivalent circuit model and through an electromagnetic modal analysis. The cavity perturbation technique is used to study the impact of the LUT on the resonant frequency and modal distribution; full-wave simulations corroborate the theoretical results. Finally, a prototype of the proposed sensor tuned to work in the 2.45 GHz band has been designed, manufactured, and measured. The device is cost-effective given the small size and practical to use, thanks to the minimal volume of the pool, which calls for quantities of LUT in the order of $0.13~\mu l$ . The prototype has been tested with an ethanol-water solution set. The experimental results match well with simulations and show good repeatability. The sensitivity of the prototype resulted in being 718 kHz per percentage of ethanol in water.