Dynamic Distributed Storage Architecture on Smart Grids

Abstract

Most of the power network services such as voltage control, asset management, or flow monitoring are implemented within a centralized paradigm. Novel distributed power generation techniques—eolian fields or local solar panels—are decentralizing this generation paradigm and forcing companies to change their traditional centralized infrastructure. This implies that intelligence and data sources are now spread over the whole network. Smart grids may enable to manage such a change although any standard architecture to deploy them on a power network exists. This challenges researchers to design and implement a new distributed storage system able to offer different levels of consistency and replication depending on the physical location of the smart sensor and according to the network needs. This paper reviews the requirements of smart grids and presents a new dynamic storage architecture following the flavor of cloud computing. This architecture is based on a variant of the primary copy scheme and is suitable to store all needed data and enable smart grids to solve the required functions in a distributed way. Moreover, it is able to offer high scalability and a consistency level similar to the one required by wireless sensor networks.