This is a companion specification of TS 103 908 [i.4] for BPSK Narrow Band Power Line Channel for Smart Grid
Applications and EN 14908 [1] which defines a representation oriented model of a smart-grid device, and specifies an
application level communication protocol on top of EN 14908: the Open Smart Grid Protocol (OSGP). OSGP is
designed to support the communication requirements between a large scale deployment of such smart-grid devices and
utility supplier or suppliers for the purposes of data collection, primarily for billing purposes by the utility or utilities
involved, but including the provision of usage information to the consumer and the control of the consumer’s use of
utility services in the event of shortage of supply on the part of the utility or transport providers or insufficient payment
by the consumer for utility services already supplied.
A typical mass deployment of metering and data collection based on EN 14908 and OSGP will include:
• Data concentrators: servers designed to store the collected data, and optionally to initiate control commands to
the smart grid devices.
• Communication proxies: these smart routers form a routing infrastructure for EN 14908 in order to support
communications between the Data concentrator and a very large number of smart-grid devices. Typical
functions of this layer may include source routing of EN 14908 packets and local management of
retransmissions, and offloading the Data concentrator from many networking tasks which would become too
resource intensive if implemented in a central node and are now distributed among communication proxies.
The communication proxy layer typically also implements route diversity. The layer of communication proxies
responsible for direct communication with smart-grid devices consists of nodes called, in the present
document, Proxy agents.
• OSGP Smart grid devices. Smart grid devices act as proxy targets, communicating with Proxy agents using
OSGP application level messages transported by EN 14908-1 [1], which carry data representations also
defined in the present document.
The scope of OSGP is the communication protocol between smart grid devices (proxy targets, which are called “OSGP
devices” or simply “devices” in the rest of the present document) and Proxy agents. Any EN 14908 proxy layer
architecture may be used with OSGP, as long as the Proxy agents comply with the normative clauses of the present
document.
Metrological and EMC considerations are not specified in the present document.