Clarkson University Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Melike Erol-Kantarci recently delivered a tutorial on smart grid and electric vehicle communications at a flagship conference of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Communications Society in June.

Erol-Kantarci presented the tutorial, "Communication Architectures and Networking for Electric Vehicles in the Smart Grid," at the IEEE International Conference on Communications in London, U.K. She collaborated with the University of Ottawa's Hussein Mouftah on the tutorial.

Erol-Kantarci said their research examined how multiple electric vehicles can be charged on a smart grid without risking the reliability and resilience of the system.

This smart grid communication is important, she said, because it allows drivers to plug their electric vehicles into charging stations at the same time without damaging distribution system equipment or causing regional blackouts.

Instead of charging all cars simultaneously, the advanced communications of the smart grid rotates the charging schedule of the cars.

"The impact of communication in electric vehicle is to provide resilience and reliability of electricity, given that they have huge electric loads," she said.

More than 30 academics as well as industry representatives attended the three-hour tutorial. Erol-Kantarci said she was pleased to see so many doctoral students interested in researching smart grid and electric vehicle communications.

"The point of many tutorials is to give background information, and we encourage them to work on the open problems in this area," she said. "Seeing that they are interested in doing research is really great."

Erol-Kantarci said she has been invited to present the tutorial at the IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous Wireless Broadband in October in Montreal.

Learn more about the conference at www.icuwb2015.org/.