Distributed Energy Trading with Communication Constraints

Distributed energy trading among energy prosumers (i.e., energy producers that also consume energy) is expected to bring significant cost benefits for the participating actors. In terms of the system architecture, physical grouping into microgrids (MG) can be further enhanced by communication infrastructure that provides support for flexible organization of prosumers into virtual MGs. However, how to manage prosumers using communication infrastructure is not widely investigated. In this paper, we propose a virtual MG architecture induced by communication constraints and consider its impact on total costs of energy trading. More precisely, we refine the distributed energy trading model considered in the recent literature with additional communication constraints and investigate impact of the resulting virtualized MG architecture on the overall energy trading costs. We show by simulations that there indeed exists an optimal energy trading architecture that achieves minimum possible energy trading cost, for any given model parameters.