With rising global warming there has been more focus on using renewable
energy to cut green house gasses emitted from burning fossil fuels. Due
to the distributed nature of the renewable energy it is not possible to
accommodate large quantities of renewable generators in out conventional
electricity grid which supports only unidirectional flow of electricity.
This forces us to redevelop the electricity grid into something called
Smart Grids. Due to the distributed nature the smart grid field
components are also distributed and communication is one of the major
components in the smart grids. Due to lack of well accepted standards in
this relatively new industry manufacturers use a proprietary
communication protocol or form an alliance to create a standard. This
would lead to compatibility issues when a heterogeneous mixture of
components have to be installed in an ecosystem. With no inexpensive
test tool which supports multiple protocols to test the compatibility it
would be difficult to ensure inter-operability between these devices. In
this book we propose a prototype for a communication protocol test bench
which can be used to partially automate testing these components.