Communication Solutions for Power Measurement in the Cloud

Abstract

Development in both embedded systems and industrial communications brings a new challenge in re-balancing Edge computing and Cloud computing, particularly in the Smart Grids. This paper presents two sets of solutions for intelligent electricity “Cloud-counters” with local power measurement and with the tele-transmission of acquired voltage and current samples for the central active and reactive power computation in a smart-metering Cloud server with virtual instrumentation capabilities. Both solutions are using low-cost Wi-Fi interfacing, TCP transmission and centralized data logging and analytics based on National Instruments LabVIEW and DIAdem interoperability. For the transmission of data between the processing and the analytics layer a database was used as interface. DIAdem is able to retrieve raw information about measured data form the database and correlates this with attached meta information like timestamp and device MAC address. The limitations in the length of TCP transmission units are dealt with a quasi-PLL computation of the exact number of samples/period and a special time-domain formula of the reactive power involving the Hilbert transform of the voltage.