STUDY OF VARIOUS MIDDLEWARE ARCHITECTURE FOR SMART

GRID
Jisha Shaji
1st yr, M.Tech Communication Engineering,
Department of Electronics & Communication,
Sree Buddha College of Engineering for Women,
Elavumthitta, Pathanamthitta

Devi Murali
Assistant Professor
Department of Electronics & Communication,
Sree Buddha College of Engineering for Women,
Elavumthitta, Pathanamthitta
Abstract
The traditional power grid is a one-way supplies that gets no feedback data about
the energy delivered which could be the most suitable one for the customers, the
shifting daily needs of electricity in a facility etc... Therefore, it is only natural that
efforts are being invested in improving power grid behavior and turning it into smart
grid. Under government-imposed open access policies, smart grid intends to
combine the traditional isolated power system and public networks, and allows
remote access by a wide variety of users. By having a communication and control
layer, smart grid will enable local data processing, decentralized control, two-way
electricity transmission, and reliability-efficiencydriven response. For that several new
components is a middleware. Middleware is expected to guarantee that updataes to
the current metering infrastructure or any addaed legancy measuring appliance will
get acknowledged for any future issue. Here a study on the most prominent
middleware architecture for smart grid is presented.

INTRODUCTION
Smart grid is an intelligent grid, which is based on an integrated, high-speed
bidirectional communication network, which supports advanced sensor and
measurement technology, advanced equipment technology and control methods to
achieve grid reliability, safe, economical, efficient, safe to use goals, its main
features includes self healing, motivation and resist attacks to meet the needs of
power requirements in the future world.
Middleware is a computer software that provide service to software
application beyond those available from the operating system. It will hide the
heterogenity from the hardware devices and from the software.
The Advantage of integrating Middleware are: In order to integrate various
devices providing communication to data, we are unifying a layer. This layer will
abstract not only all the complexity of the lower components of the Smart Grid used
for smart metering and measureing, but also the structure of grid thus keeping the
user oblivious from its structure. It is because of this issue that a middleware layer
has to be developed , thus integrating the very different components a SG is
equipped with into one homogeneous-looking layer .
Gridstat is designed to acquire data from the various equipment’s present in
the power grid. It has low-latency and reliability when transferring the data. Service-
oriented middleware provide heterogeneous service, which are the most used one in
the smart grid domain. USN are sensor based networks to provide data information,
it provide the functionality like QoS, security and filtering. Secure decentralized data-
centric information infrastructure provide an IP at the communication layer and it
tackle the power related issues in smart grid [1].
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 Figure 1. Basic concept of Smart Grid
GRID STAT
Grid stat is used to provide a flexible communication network on the electric
power system. It will meet the low flexibility and QoS requirements. It utilizes the
available resources to achieve low-latency, and QoS managed multicast. The main
advantage of using a middleware framework is that it will avoid thornier issue
involved in wide-area communication. So the data providers and application
developers can concentrate on application needs[1].
Grid Stat Architecture
The Grid stat architecture handle network management and data delivery by
separate but have an interacting subsystem called planes. Basically there are two
types of planes (i) Management Plane and (ii) Data Plane.
The Management plane will allocates resources and the network is being
changed due to power system configuration or communication network failures. The
Data plane will forward the data from single sender to many destinations as per the
direction of Management plane[1][6].
Gridstat data plane is based on publish-subscribe communication model. Publish-
Subscribe is a message pattern where sender of message is called publishers, do
not program the message to be sent directly to specific receivers called subscribers.
This can easily add subscribers and can change the characteristics of the subscriber
at runtime. The publisher will announce its available data stream to the management
plane. Now subscriber will request the middleware for deliver path to achieve
delivery of data. The announcement and request application of publishers and
subscribers are provided by various Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Also
this APIs allow the publisher and subscriber to send and receive their data item.
The basic architecture of Gridstat is shown in Figure 2. The active component of
management plane is QoS brokers and that of the data plane is status router. The
QoS brokers are being arranged in the hierarchical order with policies set at higher
level in the hierarchical controlling more global aspects and allowing local concerns
to be implemented using policies at lower level. The hierarchical is put forward to
support communication network management and cyber-security policies. For
example, hierarchy enabled system have right to allocate bandwidth depending upon
the application with the company and limit internal and external subscription to status
variable.

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 Figure 2. Gridstat Architecture.
The status routers of the data plane have a flat organization in contest to the
hierarchy of the management plane. A collection of status router from the same
administrative domain and having same resource management and cyber-security
strategy is called cloud. A cloud of status router is controlled by a QoS Broker, which
is at the bottom of the hierarchy which is called a leaf QoS Broker. Thus status router
will formed incoming data to the outgoing communication link that have a
downstream subscriber communication link between the clouds are managed by a
least-common-ancestor QoS broker that manages the individual clouds based on the
policies of the QoS broker. In the case of announcing publications and requesting
subscription, publishers and subscribers interact with a QoS broker with the help of
middleware APIs. For a publication, the QoS broker will note whether any publication
is available and if available its publication rate. While the subscription process is
quite complicated.
SERVICE-ORIENTED MIDDLEWARE
Service-oriented middleware architecture design is based on service-driven,
user-centric and specifically designed to meet the requirements of smart grid. The
main component of middleware is wide area monitoring system(WAMs) [5].
Traditionally used monitoring systems are SCADA and EMS. The main
disadvantages of these systems are they are slow in response and can’t meet the
performance demand. WAMs are sensor based networks and it having a high speed
internet. Security is a critical issue. Real-time data is being transmitted over WAN to
the control centre, so the chance for attack is more here. Hence the data is being
encrypted, at the destination it is being decrypted to extract the original data [6].
The SG will serve well for achieving better power allocation as well as power
consumption. The service-oriented middleware consist of a series of protocol stack
and scheduling scheme. It provide variety of applications like:
 Different types of smart meters can be incorporated.
 Controlling the exchange of information flow.
 Satisfying the distributed nature of power consumption information.

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In order to deal with multimedia applications, the middleware should efficiently utilize
the available spectrum bandwidth and also control the flow of information exchange.
Various devices like camera, microphones etc… are to be incorporated to collect the
data in the form of video as well as audio.
Heterogeneous Service Infrastructure
The service infrastructure for the smart grid depends on the communication
link, that it collect the data and transmit the real-time data to control centre. In order
to provide a heterogeneous service in general smart grid, the design part consists of
three modules:
 Transmission part
 Control part
 User part
Transmission part
It is the foundation for basic service framework. Depending upon the
functionality it is divided into Generation, Communication and Distribution. The main
function of this layer is to transfer the generated power to distributors through various
substations. The core component in transmission part is Adaptive Meter
Infrastructure (AMI).

Figure 3. Heterogeneous service Infrastructure

It collects data and transfer to the controller through the communication network.
The controller will helps to set power consumption price by shifting consumption
time and hence lowering the cost.
Control Part
It will connect the user part and transmission part. The main function of this
layer is effectively manages the complex and diverse devices to achieve the QoS.
Depending upon the visual based framework the functions of control part is divided
into four.
 Fault Report
 Power allocation
 User information management
 Security guarantee

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SG requires a dynamic model based on the quality generated. Power is being
supplied to the customers according to their QoE requirement. The power scheduling
is being done by the control centre [7] [8].
User Part
The major function of this is to provide QoS to the customers. QoS depends
on the factors like reliability, jitter, delay, and bandwidth. It will provide high reliability,
and availability.
UBIQUITOUS SENSOR NETWORK MIDDLEWARE (USN)
In order to support SG applications here introducing an end-to-end integration of
heterogeneous technology by using ubiquitous sensor based architecture[9]. The
main component of the USN is a sensor network that interact itself and other
infrastructure to obtain, process, transfer and provide information extracted from
outside world.
Another important component is the smart meter which acts as a bridge between
user and power consumption metering. It is used to analyse, control and provide
useful information to utility.
Here developing a unique integration system in which all the applications can
take advantage of the same strength. There are many applications where we are
using USN, which is based on context awareness. They can be classified as [10]:
 Detection: Detecting a temperature, whether it exceeds a limit or not,
intruders etc...
 Tracking: Tracking items in supply chain management, plug-in electric
vehicle in intelligent transport system.
 Monitoring: Monitoring the abnormal devices.
The USN architecture can be divided into various layers. The first layer
consists of different sensor networks, which transmit and collect information
regarding the surrounding environment [11] [12].

Figure 4. USN Middleware Architecture

SECURE DECENTRALIZED DATA-CENTRIC INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURE
FOR SG
If the EMS is acting as control centre it will not have any mechanism to
communicate with each other. Currently EMS queries in a round robin manner at
different substations for reporting the current states. It collects the data in a
estimated states of the grid. So it is in a centralized manner. Under this centralized

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case the data can’t be send or stored as communication bandwidth is limited and a
central repository does not have enough space to store all the data. The solution for
this problem is a decentralized data centric information infrastructure. This is spatial
and temporal locality regarding data usage on the next generation grid can be
leveraged as an opportunity to optimize the usage of communication bandwidth,
CPU cycle, and storage space while significantly improving the reliability of the smart
grid. The basic goal of this system is to deliver the right amount of measured or
computed data at the right time in a cost effective, secure and reliable manner [13].

Figure 5. Secure Decentralized data centric information infrastructure

The decentralized data centric information infrastructure consists of following major
parts.
i. Publisher-Subscriber data delivery
ii. Networked cache/ storage
iii. API
Publisher-Subscriber data delivery
A Publisher-Subscriber system is used to deliver time-sensitive data at right time to
the right entity. Here a master slave communication model is implemented. The
basic working of publisher-subscriber model is; Publisher announces the availability
of data and subscribers request their interest in certain types of data. The data is
transferred, if the announcement and request are being matched [14]. The following
are the properties of Publisher-Subscriber model:
 It enables the decoupling of information in terms of space, time and
synchronization.
 It is distributed, peer-to-peer, and enable multicasting.
 Highly securable
 Improved security and prevents Denial of Service(DoS) attacks.
 There is no single point of failure or bottleneck.
Networked cache/storage
In the current power grid, the amount of data stored is limited by the disk
capacity on the central repository. This is because of the centralized system used
today. If the disk capacity of the centralized system was increased, it will reduce
performance, cost-effectiveness and the single point of failure.
In this system a scalable storage system that addresses the vulnerabilities of
the centralized system by building virtually distributed storage systems made up of

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many physical disks, whose individual capacities are lower than that of a centralized
disk. This system is quite cost efficient. The unnecessary high bandwidth can be
avoided by using hash functions.
Application Programming Interface
The API architecture has three main components:
Non-critical data event module: Entity used for data transmission for non-critical data
related to event.
Time critical data event mode: Entity used for data transmission non-critical data
related to event.
Control command module: Entity used for commands related to control functionality.
Advantages and disadvantages of various middleware architecture.

Middleware Advantages Disadvantages

Gridstat Flexible architecture for event CORBA usage and its
and data collection. Publish- suitable alternatives are
subscribe model suitable for the much complex and result
challenges of the project. QoS in low capability of devices
is provided. and smart meter.
Middleware They are service-centric instead No context-awareness
of device centric. Provide QoS and low capability of
as well as QoE devices.
USN Low capability devices can be No sematic performances
connected. Provide QoS as are being provided.
well as security.
Secure decentralized Self-healing and self- No many specifications
data centric configurability capabilities can about middleware
be implemented. Security can implementation.
be achieved.

CONCLUSION
This paper has presented a survey on the most prominent solutions on
middleware architectures for the Smart Grid, acknowledging middleware as a
necessity for energy usage improvement and infrastructure management.
Middleware architectures that have been found as matching the scope of this paper
have been further analysed, presenting their main characteristics, along with the way
they work and both their strong points and improvable features. In Gridstat it has a
very flexible architecture but low capability devices cannot be incorporated. In the
case of Service-oriented middleware multimedia application can be achieved but
they are not context aware. We can implement sensor networks in the USN. While
more security can be achieved using Secure decentralized data-centric.

REFERNCES
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