ABSTRACT:

Despite their huge differences, the Internet and the power grid share similar delivery patterns in the sense that the Internet delivers information from one place to another and the power grid deliver electric energy from one place to another. They are also facing their own evolution and growth challenges in their respective contexts. For Internet, its primary arena has changed dramatically from its initial academic usage to the commercial world which brought a series of significant research challenges and issues related to the Internet's architectural evolution. The power grid, on the other hand, has a strong need to transform its infrastructure with more intelligence, using networking and computing technologies. Creating a smarter power grid in energy consuming buildings will improve the operation, efficiency, security, and power quality of the grid. Thus, in this dissertation, we not only study the Internet core evolution, we also study a particular edge network application in intelligent buildings in the interdisciplinary context of networking and energy efficiency. In particular, this dissertation covers two inter-correlated parts: PART I: next generation Internet architecture and related research issues such as inter-domain routing, naming and addressing, mobility and multihoming, renumbering, traffic engineering, security, and policy enforcement; PART II: interdisciplinary topics related to cyber-assisted energy efficiency in intelligent buildings and cyberassisted sustainability. These two parts correlate with each other and reflect the research problems and complexity of the evolution of the Internet and consumer-side power grid, individually and interactively. For the PART I, we study the evolution of the next generation Internet architecture and try to find new methods to address the key challenges and research issues mentioned above. We address the research challenges with a holistic, open, and evolutional new Internet architecture named MILSA with new design principles matching the new contexts. The major contributions include: (1) designing and elaborating the novel Internet architecture framework based on Identifier (ID) Locator Split principle; (2) providing naming and addressing enhancing designs including secure IDs; (3) transition mechanisms on how the current Internet can be gradually migrated to the new architecture; (4) deployment incentives and strategies evaluation by defining a series of unified quantitative metrics; (5) a novel incrementally deployable multi-granularity multihoming framework supporting multiple types of multihoming, particularly data and user multihoming. For PART II, we focus on the latest trends in inter-disciplinary synergy among three areas: networking and Internet technologies, smart grids, and energy. The major theme is the energy consumer-side smart grid, i.e., various intelligent buildings. We focus on applying the key related networking technologies and findings to intelligent buildings for better intelligence and energy efficiency. The major contributions include: (1) finding energy consumption patterns and issues with the existing buildings and identifying key methods to improve the energy efficiency using networking and computing technologies; (2) developing network architecture for the enterprise/home buildings and creating "energy proportionality" and enable energy optimization for multi-scale organizations; (3) prototyping the proposed idea and carrying out experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed ideas.

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