QoE-Driven Power Scheduling in Smart Grid: Architecture, Strategy, and Methodology

Smart grid is a new emerging technology which is able to intelligently control the power consumption via network. Therefore, the efficiency of the information exchange between the power suppliers (or control centers) and power customers is an important issue for smart grid. Moreover, the performance of the smart grid usually depends on the customer's satisfaction degree which belongs to the field of quality of experience. In this article, we propose a QoE-driven power scheduling in the context of smart grid from the perspectives of architecture, strategy, and methodology. Specifically, it takes into account the QoE requirement when designing the power allocation scheme. For obtaining the QoE requirement, we analyze the fluctuation of the power load and the impact of the transmission delay. In particular, the power allocation is formulated as an optimization problem that maximizes the social welfare of the system. Based on the given QoE model, an efficient power scheduling scheme is proposed by jointly considering the admission control and QoE expectation. Extensive simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme can efficiently allocate the power according to the dynamic QoE requirements in a practical smart grid system.