Dr Debajit Palit

Director, Rural Energy and Livelihoods

The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), India

Title : Evolution of Rural Electrification in India towards universal electricity access: A critical rumination

Abstract: In March 2019, India attained near universal electrification with the completion of electrification of almost all households in the country including in the rural areas. This presentation analyses the evolution of the process of rural electrification in India including distributed renewable energy and mini-grids, the factors that potentially determined the household electricity access, and juxtaposed that with the policies adopted over three distinct politico-historical periods: the pre-independence period; the period of state ownership and the post-reforms period.  The presentation then builds on the key insights that could be drawn from the evolution in retrospect and attempts to highlight key historical challenges that the electricity sector - both grid and mini-grids - has been constantly grappling with. Finally, the presentation also shares some lessons and what further needs to be done to strengthen the rural electricity distribution sector in India.

Vivek Pandey

Senior Deputy General Manager

Power System Operation Corp. Ltd., Mumbai, India

Title : Emerging trends and thrust areas in the bulk electric power system of India

Abstract: The talk would provide an overview of the operation of power system and electricity market in India. It would highlight the ongoing transition, the envisaged challenges and the initiatives being taken to ensure a reliable, secure, economic, efficient and resilient power system in India.

Dr. Mohammad Rihan 

Electrical Engineering Department

Aligarh Muslim University

Title : Decarbonising the Electric Power Grid: Requirement, Opportunities, and Challenges

Abstract: The  Electric Power Grid is going through the most radical transformation since its origin. The concerns related to contribution of electricity generation sources on adverse effects on climate leading to global warming are the prime drivers for this change. The target of reducing the carbon dioxide in the environment involves decarbonisation of electric power grid as a major component.

The two major changes taking place in the power grid are; 1) Growing share of variable energy sources like wind and solar to the extent that these sources are set to become the mainstay of the power grid. 2) Encouraged by the successful integration of these green sources of electricity with the grid and economic parity with conventional sources shifting the transportation and heating sectors also to the electric power is imminent. The increasing integration of variable energy sources like solar and wind has raised two important issues; the inherent variability of these sources makes system balancing challenging and inertia less generation from inverters deprives the grid from important balancing action. Therefore it is important to devise and deploy technologies and solutions and prepare trained manpower for the changed power grid.

This tutorial aims to address this requirement by discussing the changed nature of the grid, the challenges expected, and important questions to be addressed by the engineers and researchers. It is expected that the discussion will lead to the generation of interest of the participants on some of the following questions:

·       What new capabilities will the engineers need to design, built, and operate the new grid?

·       What new technical and engineering solutions will be required to guarantee that that this more complex grid will operate safely and reliably?

·       What skills will the manpower related to power system of the future need?

·       What is the role of emerging technologies including the Internet of Things etc. in managing the new grid?

Dr. Mayank Pandey

Computer Science & Engineering Department, MNNIT Allahabad, India

Title : Software Defined Networks: The road towards and ahead

Abstract: From the beginning, traditional networking solutions have utilized different specialized devices such as routers, switches, gateways, and firewalls. These devices perform network functions like the discovery of network topology and optimal route, forwarding of data packets, and load balancing and access control. These network functions can be broadly classified as the control plane, data plane, and management plane functions. In traditional networking devices, these three planes are tightly coupled. Further, different network functions are realized using standard protocol implementations and vendor specific proprietary solutions. This results in configuration of these networking devices on a device‐to‐device basis. The rules and policies are configured once and utilized for most of the lifetime. Reconfiguration of these devices is difficult, time consuming, and may have associated downtime.

In the past decade, a lot of growth has been observed in the area of network application development. Also, the way users access the network (data link layer protocols) has shifted a lot from traditional wired to currently popular wireless and mobile technologies. On the other hand, the routing layer responsible for data transfer from source to destination has not been able to match up the pace of this development in application layer and data link layer. Further, technological advances such as Internet of Things (IoT), fog/edge computing, container and virtual machine (VM) ‐based executable environments, and video streaming over mobile devices require underlying network to be more agile, flexible, and dynamically adapting according to the application context.

 Software‐defined networks (SDN) is an upcoming network architecture which can overcome the challenges faced by traditional networks. This has been done by separating control plane and management plane from the data plane of the networking devices and by logically centralizing network intelligence in a component known as controller. The controller has the full view of the topology and can write required rules and policies. SDN facilitates the network administrators to write controller programs used to manage, configure, and optimize the network resources. Traditionally, this facility was not available with the network administrators. Besides network abstraction, SDN also supports a large set of APIs which help to implement common network services. These services may include routing, security, access control, bandwidth management, traffic engineering, and quality of service. These services can be dynamically customized according to the application context.

In this talk, I would attempt to provide the audience a guided tour on the road towards the SDN and a glimpse of the future that lies ahead. I would be sharing the experiences of our research group engaged in SDN related designs and implementations from last 4-5 years.  We have been attempting to use SDN to deal with the issues faced by protocols and procedures at different layers of network stack (from data link layer to application layer). I would be taking some relevant use-cases where SDN like solutions are getting utilized and some other application context where future of SDN looks promising. For example, SDN concepts are getting used successfully in Data Centre scenarios and can beautifully fit in the upcoming designs such as P2P CDN (Content Delivery Network), ICN (Information Centric Networking) and NDN (Named Data Networking) etc.

Dr. Arun Prakash

Electronics & Comm. Engineering Department, MNNIT Allahabad

Title : Challenges in Vehicular Communication and Networking Standard IEEE 802.11p

Abstract: Recent advances in wireless technologies have enabled its multi-dimensional usage across various sectors. Vehicular safety is one of them. In this context, intelligent transportation systems (ITS)  has adopted IEEE 802.11p standard for vehicular communication and networking (VCN) to increase vehicular safety on roads. The IEEE standard 802.11p specifies physical and medium access control layer specifications for VCN. The performance of IEEE 802.11p physical layer is one of the important factors that play a great role in the communication process. It has to meet the specific needs and environmental conditions to which the system is exposed. This tutorial presents an overview of the physical layer of the IEEE 802.11p standard. The specifications, performance and challenges of the physical layer as well as several techniques to mitigate the shortcomings are discussed and analyzed.

Dr. Yogendra Kumar Prajapati

Electronics & Comm. Engineering Department, MNNIT Allahabad

Title : Free space optical communication: Future & its challenges

Abstract: The demand of high speed information transmission has become a trend in recent communication systems. With the increase in number of users and development of next generation services like 5G mobile communication, smart TV, broadband networks, video on demand etc. we are experiencing a rising demand of high speed data transmission and reception at the access point. So far the access points are interconnected by coaxial, and RF/ microwave links. These communication links in general the copper and RF based links have limitations such as low bandwidth, high cost of deployment, insecure data transmission, and high licensing cost. Optical fiber communication though have high data transmission rate (>10Gbps) at 0.2 dB/Km attenuation, it is mostly used for optical backbone networks. Free space optical (FSO) communication is a promising technology to address the last mile bottleneck issue as it transmits the bunch of data by means of light wave. FSO’s unlicensed spectrum, ease of deployment, secure LOS communication, and low power consumption features attract the researchers/students to uncover the optical communication benefits within free-space medium.