Dissertation in the field of Signal Processing for Communications, Jayaprakash Rajasekharan
”Modeling Cooperative Behavior in Smart Grid and Cognitive Radio Systems”.
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The title of thesis is ”Modeling Cooperative Behavior in Smart Grid and Cognitive Radio Systems”.
Cooperation is a fundamentally instinctive trait in humans that results in mutual benefits for all persons involved irrespective of whether we are living in a hunter-gatherer com-munity or a digital society. Forming coalitions to achieve a common goal and sharing the benefits of cooperation is an evolutionary practice. However, does cooperative behavior provide significant gains for players in complex multi-user intelligent systems such as smart grids or cognitive radios? How are the gains from cooperation shared fairly be-tween players?
The electricity distribution grid is being modernized rapidly in recent times. Smart grids are characterized by distributed generation, battery energy storage, electric vehicles, real-time monitoring and control, active end-user participation, etc. Utility companies wish to fully utilize the bidirectional nature of information and energy flow in smart grids to match demand and supply of electricity in real-time. This is done by means of de-mand side management (DSM) techniques such as load control, dynamic pricing, local energy markets, etc. The proposed cooperative DSM algorithms for smart homes with batteries under time of use energy pricing has shown to yield significant gains in terms of reduced costs for consumers and balanced loads for utility company. Such algorithms have just started to appear in commercial products for automated home energy man-agement systems.
With enormous increase in spectrum demand in recent times, certain frequency bands face scarcity and yet, spectrum is largely under-utilized across space and time. This is due to inefficient static spectrum allocation policies. Cognitive radios facilitate dynamic spectrum access (DSA) through flexible configuration of radio transmitter and receiver parameters. In DSA, unlicensed secondary users (SUs) opportunistically access parts of the spectrum unused by licensed primary users. SUs form coalitions to jointly scan the spectrum and share unused frequency bands amongst themselves. The proposed co-operative model for jointly sensing and sharing spectrum has shown to achieve the best balance between data rates, fairness and cooperation among all models. DSA models for TV broadcast bands have been standardized and will soon improve broadband con-nectivity in rural and remote areas.
Opponents: Professor Vincent Poor, Princeton University, NJ, USA and Associate Professor Joakim Jaldén, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Supervisor: Academy Professor Visa Koivunen, Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering, Department of Signal Processing and Acoustics
Contact information:
Jayaprakash Rajasekharan
+47 94814929
jayaprakash.rajasekharan@aalto.fi