Transaction-based energy (TE) management and control has become an increasingly relevant topic, attracting considerable attention from industry and the research community alike. As a result, new techniques are emerging for its development and actualization. This paper presents a comprehensive review of TE involving peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading and also covering the concept, enabling technologies, frameworks, active research efforts and the prospects of TE. The formulation of a common approach for TE management modelling is challenging given the diversity of circumstances of prosumers in terms of capacity, profiles and objectives. This has resulted in divergent opinions in the literature. The idea of this paper is therefore to explore these viewpoints and provide some perspectives on this burgeoning topic on P2P TE systems. This study identified that most of the techniques in the literature exclusively formulate energy trade problems as a game, an optimization problem or a variational inequality problem. It was also observed that none of the existing works has considered a unified messaging framework. This is a potential area for further investigation.

Rising awareness and emergence of smart technologies have inspired new thinking in energy system management. Whilst integration of distributed energy resources in micro-grids (MGs) has become the technique of choice for consumers to generate their energy, it also provides a unique opportunity to explore energy trading and sharing amongst them. This paper investigates peer-to-peer (P2P) communication architectures for prosumers’ energy trading and sharing. The performances of common P2P protocols are evaluated under the stringent communication requirements of energy networks defined in IEEE 1547.3-2007. Simulation results show that the structured P2P protocol exhibits a reliability of 99.997% in peer discovery and message delivery whilst the unstructured P2P protocol yields 98%, both of which are consistent with the requirements of MG applications. These two architectures exhibit high scalability with a latency of 0.5 s at a relatively low bandwidth consumption, thus, showing promising potential in their adoption for prosumer to prosumer communication.

The high attenuation which increases as frequency increases in power line communication systems (PLC) makes achieving and sustaining high data rates over such channels a challenging task. In most communication systems, relays are normally deployed to overcome the effect of signal attenuation and to achieve reliable transmissions between users. Amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relays are often used. In contrast to the existing work on this topic which advocate utilizing relays either between PLC links or between wireless links, the authors of this paper focus on using AF relaying for in-home PLC and wireless systems where one PLC user wants to share data with one wireless user which has no access to the PLC network. We refer to this system as the Hybrid approach. A mathematical method is developed for this network to formulate the capacity of the system by exploiting the statistical properties of both PLC and wireless channels. Monte Carlo simulations are used throughout this paper to validate the analytical results. The impact of several system parameters is investigated in this paper. For the sake of comparison, we also provide the performance analysis and results for a PLC only network. The results showed that the performance of the hybrid system enhances as we increase the relay gain and deteriorates as the end-to-end distance increases. It is also found that the PLC only scheme may outperform the hybrid one if the relay gain is relatively small; however, the user mobility offered by the hybrid system remains the main advantage over the PLC only system.

Reliable data transmissions and offering better mobility to the end user can be achieved by integrating different communication systems. In this paper, we investigate the performance of a cascaded indoor power line communication (PLC)/visible light communication (VLC) system with the presence of an amplify-and-forward (AF) relay. Using the pre-installed infrastructure of electricity wiring networks gives the advantage to use PLC as a backbone for VLCs. The performance of the proposed hybrid system is discussed in terms of the average capacity. A mathematical method is developed for this network to formulate the capacity by exploiting the statistical properties of both the PLC and VLC channels. The derived analytical expressions are validated by Monte Carlo simulations. The results showed that there is a considerable improvement in the performance of the hybrid system as the relay gain increases whereas it deteriorates with increasing the end-to-end distance. A comparison between the performance of a parallel hybrid/PLC and hybrid systems is also provided. It is found that the hybrid/PLC system outperforms the hybrid one. However, the user mobility offered by the latter system remains the main advantage over the former approach.

Algorithms for distributed coordination and control are increasingly being used in smart grid applications including peer-to-peer energy trading and sharing to improve reliability and efficiency of the power system. However, for realistic deployment of these algorithms, their designs should take into account the suboptimal conditions of the communication network, in particular the communication links that connect the energy trading entities in the energy network. This study proposes a distributed adaptive primal (DAP) routing algorithm to facilitate communication and coordination among proactive prosumers in an energy network over imperfect communication links. The proposed technique employs a multi-commodity flow optimization scheme in its formulation with the objective to minimize both the communication delay and loss of energy transactional messages due to suboptimal network conditions. Taking into account realistic constraints relating to network delay and communication link capacity between the peers, the DAP routing algorithm is used to evaluate network performance using various figures of merit such as probability of signal loss, message delay, congestion and different network topologies. Further, we address the link communication delay problem by redirecting traffic from congested links to less utilized ones. The results show that the proposed routing algorithm is robust to packet loss on the communication links with a 20% reduction in delay compared with hop-by-hop adaptive link state routing algorithm.