Message Oriented Middleware with QoS Support for Smart Grids

The rapid growth on the adoption of smart grids technologies is enabling the improvement of efficiency, reliability and security on energy distribution and consumption. The efficiency increase comes from the overall monitor- ing of the electricity network, and from the capability of acting upon loads in order to better adapt to overall and local energy production from traditional sources and renewables. To guarantee that these energy sources can be effectively used, smart grid systems must be able to react quickly and predictably, adapting to changing supply, by controlling loads and energy storage. Many applications have been identified and developed to optimize power grid systems, and these applications rely on a solid communications network that is secure, highly scalable, and always available. Thus, any communication infrastructure for smart grids should support its potential of producing high quantities of real-time data, with the goal of reacting to state changes by actuating on devices in real-time, while providing Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to the communications. These functionalities can be supported by a Message-Oriented Middleware, which allows interconnecting houses and controlling applications in a distributed environment. Therefore, in this paper we survey and analyze existing middleware solutions for the support of distributed scalable large-scale applications with QoS requirements that are structured on top of a Message oriented Middleware. The paper concludes DDS is the most suitable technology for smart grid application with QoS requirements.