Smart Grid Communications: QoS Stovepipes or QoS Interoperability? 1,2

Interoperability is a key requirement for data communications in the “smart grid”. It has been articulated at great length by the GridWise Architecture Council (GWAC). However, the interoperability issues identified here to date include only interoperability of the data exchange. In this paper, we first argue that middleware is a key enabling technology for helping meet interoperability requirements and avoid stovepipe systems in the smart grid. We then argue that the smart grid’s data communications must support interoperability of Quality of Service (QoS) and security mechanisms across an entire power grid; this will necessarily involve traversing multiple organizations’ IT infrastructures that may have different network-level mechanisms for providing QoS and security. We introduce the concept of QoS stovepipes to illustrate how such QoS and security interoperability may occur. We then argue that the application programmer interface for such QoS and security requirements must be kept as high-level as possible to avoid QoS stovepipes. Finally, we argue that middleware-level mechanisms are a much better way to provide this end-to-end QoS and security, compared to the usual technique in the power grid of using (and getting locked into) network-level mechanisms (which the middleware is built on top of).