An Edge Computing Framework for Real-Time Monitoring in Smart Grid

Due to the ever-growing demands in modern cities, unreliable and inefficient power transportation becomes one critical issue in nowadays power grid. This makes power grid monitoring one of the key modules in power grid system and play an important role in preventing severe safety accidents. However, the traditional manual inspection cannot efficiently achieve this goal due to its low efficiency and high cost. Smart grid as a new generation of the power grid, sheds new light to construct an intelligent, reliable and efficient power grid with advanced information technology. In smart grid, automated monitoring can be realized by applying advanced deep learning algorithms on powerful cloud computing platform together with such IoT (Internet of Things) devices as smart cameras. The performance of cloud monitoring, however, can still be unsatisfactory since a large amount of data transmission over the Internet will lead to high delay and low frame rate. In this paper, we note that the edge computing paradigm can well complement the cloud and significantly reduce the delay to improve the overall performance. To this end, we propose an edge computing framework for real-time monitoring, which moves the computation away from the centralized cloud to the near-device edge servers. To maximize the benefits, we formulate a scheduling problem to further optimize the framework and propose an efficient heuristic algorithm based on the simulated annealing strategy. Both real-world experiments and simulation results show that our framework can increase the monitoring frame rate up to 10 times and reduce the detection delay up to 85% comparing to the cloud monitoring solution.