Cisco's Smart Grid Team is excited to support the Wireless Smart Utility Network Alliance (Wi-SUN). Lionel Chocron, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Connected Energy Networks Business, will be representing Cisco on the Wi-Sun board of directors. Cisco will be joining at the promoter level and the entire team is looking forward to helping drive the development of interoperable Field Area Networks (FAN) for utility applications.

Field Area Networks today are often closed,  proprietary systems and generally just supporting a single service. As a result, they do not support interoperability across multiple vendors or take advantage of the decades of networking expertise available within the Internet Protocol suite (IP).

By supporting Wi-SUN, Cisco will help drive the technical definition for standards based, multi service, secure, and scalable Field Area Networks. The Field Area Networks will support important utility use cases including Automatic Metering Infrastructure, Outage Management, and Distribution Automation.

The Wi-SUN defined Field Area Network will be based upon the IP protocol suite, with the initial release based on IEEE 802.15.4g PHY and 802.15.4e MAC wireless mesh technologies.  Usage of the IP protocol suite will provide many benefits, including the ability to support additional PHY/MAC technologies in the future.

Our team will further assist in the development of certification testing and "plug-fests" for regions around the world. This will ensure international interoperability between multiple vendors implementing the Wi-SUN defined Field Area Network.

"We are very pleased to be joining the Wi-SUN alliance, and look forward to collaborating with our industry partners to bring interoperable, standards based utility Field Area Networks to reality," said Lionel Chocron, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Connected Energy Networks Business Unit.

Other companies who are promoters of the Wi-Sun alliance include:

Further details about the Wi-SUN Alliance can be found here

Cisco Connected Grid products and solution information is available here