Assessment of High-performance Smart Metering for the Web Service Enabled Smart Grid

The electricity network is undergoing a significant change towards a more adaptive, intelligent, self-managing, collaborative and information-driven grid. According to the smart grid vision, any electronic device connected to it will be able to communicate its consumed or produced energy almost in real time. Based on the analysis of this newly acquired information, a new generation of services and decision support systems can be realized, enabling more intelligent decisions, and ultimately a more efficient energy system. Therefore, high-performance acquisition of smart metering information from large scale distributed infrastructures is of key importance for the upcoming Internet-based enterprise services and mash-up applications. We have used open source software to build a web service-based advanced metering infrastructure of simulated smart meters, concentrators, and a smart metering platform, all interconnected via web services. We measure in a methodological fashion the performance of the various components of the architecture and evaluate their limitations. Finally we identify key performance indicators that need to be considered when deploying large-scale smart metering systems, and discuss on challenges and directions that arise.