Critique of "A survey of communication network paradigms for substation
automation," M. Qureshi, A. Raza, et al., in Proc. of IEE International
Symposium on Power Line Communications and Its Applications (ISPLC), April,
2008. by Michael Grissom, Febuary 3, 2011. 


I found the article you have posted for this week an interesting read.
I was confused at times as to who the target was for the networks he
was describing.  It seemed like he was building networks to support both
SA as well as consumers.

In his discussion of Power Line Communications (PLC) he glosses over
or ignores the amount of hardware that gets installed into the network
so the data can be routed around the myriad of transformers throughout
the network. This was an issue for CenterPoint Energy here in Texas when
they were piloting Broadband over Powerline and restricted its usage to
high density locations.

The authors also seem to contradict themselves by saying the 27/18 Mbps of
PLC is "high" bandwidth, but later state the 54 Mbps bandwidth of 802.11g
wireless is limited.  There discussion of wireless was also limited
to the 802.11 standards.  I currently have Motorola and Proxima radios
installed in the gas fields of Western Colorado near Parachute that are
100 Mbps point to point links that function extremely well.  Let alone
what you could achieve if you spent the money and put in licensed radios.

I was also slightly disturbed by the age of the references used.  Many are
almost a decade old with the fiber optics reference being from 1997.
Even in the late 90's and the early part of 2000 when I was at Qwest,
we were driving fiber connections almost 70km yet here in 2008 the
authors list the limit for fiber at 2km.

And then after such in depth analysis of all the different networking
types, they have no worthwhile discussion about EPON.  Even though it
is their final recommendation, they don't even go as far as defining
the acronym.