This brief focuses on stochastic energy optimization for distributed energy resources in smart grids. Along with a review of drivers and recent developments towards distributed energy resources, this brief presents research challenges of integrating millions of distributed energy resources into the grid. The brief then proposes a novel three-level hierarchical architecture for effectively integrating distributed energy resources into smart grids. Under the proposed hierarchical architecture, distributed energy resource management algorithms at the three levels (i.e., smart home, smart neighborhood, and smart microgrid) are developed in this brief based on stochastic optimization that can handle the involved uncertainties in the system.

This SpringerBrief focuses on spectrum trading designs in multi-hop cognitive radio networks. It starts with the motivation for spectrum trading and the review of existing spectrum trading designs. Then, it presents a novel CRN architecture for spectrum trading considering spectrum trading's economic features and wireless nature. Under this network architecture, it extends current single-hop per-user based spectrum trading design into a multi-hop transmission opportunity based one, and further into a session based one, while having economic properties guaranteed. This SpringerBrief not only provides a good review of current spectrum trading designs, it also touches on the cutting-edge interdisciplinary spectrum trading research on disparate fields of modeling, network architecture design, optimization theories, statistics, and economic theories. Advanced-level students studying computer science, electrical and computer engineering and economics, wireless network planners, and wireless spectrum engineers will find this book a useful tool.