摘要：The Sm.rt Grid has three m.in characteristics, which are to som. degree antagonistic. These characteristics are: provision of good power quality, energy cost reduction and im.rovem.nt in the reliability of the grid. The need to ensure that they can be accom.lished together dem.nds a m.ch richer ICT m.nitoring and control network than the current system. In this paper we particularly investigate the design and deploym.nt of the ICT system.in the urban environm.nt, specifically in a university cam.us that is em.edded in a city, thus it represents the Neighbourhood Area Network (NAN) level of the Sm.rt Grid. In order to design an ICT infrastructure, we have introduced two related architectures: nam.ly com.unications network architecture and a software architecture. Having access to the characteristics of a real NAN guides us to choose appropriate com.unication technologies and identify the actual requirem.nts of the system. To im.lem.nt these architectures at this level we need to gather and process inform.tion from.environm.ntal sensors (m.nitoring e.g. tem.erature, m.vem.nt of people and vehicles) that can provide useful inform.tion about changes in the loading of the NAN, with inform.tion from.instrum.ntation of the Power Grid itself. Energy constraints are one of the m.jor lim.tations of the com.unication network in the Sm.rt Grid, especially where wireless networking is proposed. Thus we analyse the m.st energy efficient m.thod of collecting and sending data. The m.in contribution of this research is that we propose and im.lem.nt an energy efficient ICT network and describe our software architecture at the NAN level, currently very underdeveloped. We also discuss our experim.ntal results. To our knowledge, no such architectures have yet been im.lem.nted for collecting data which can provide the basis of Decision Support Tools (DSTs).