ABSTRACT
Nowadays, there is an increasing interest towards efficient, reliable, two-way, and low-cost communication technologies to fulfill the demands of electric utilities [1]- [6] and, mainly, to introduce smart grid technologies into electric power systems. Worldwide efforts have been made to raise the needs for smart grid communications (SG-Comm), to assess the the SG-Comm infrastructure and, to specify the constraints and the requirements for designing the system and deploying the SGComm service [7]-[13]. Another worldwide issue challenging the communication industry is to attend to the demands posed by the need to lessen the digital division numbers-today around 70% of the world population does not have Internet access. Several attempts at addressing this issue with the use of current technologies, such as satellite communication, wireless communication (RF, Wimax, and LTE), optic communication, and DSL are being investigated and deployed. All attempts to use such technologies fail to deliver proper Internet access to this group of the population correctly due to the constraints related to over 2/3 of the worldwide population.
