Formalizing the Semantics of DDS QoS Policies for Improved Communications in Distributed Smart Grid Applications

Abstract

Quality communication is a major challenges in large-scale and distributed smart grid applications. Several protocols and middleware have been proposed to address communication quality issues in those applications. DDS is a standard data-centric middleware for publish/subscribe communication. It has been proposed for smart grid to address both connectivity and communication quality issues. DDS provides multiple quality of service (QoS) policies to address reliability, latency, and data availability. One of the main challenges in adopting the standard in smart grids is the complexity of adopting and tailoring its QoS policies. This is because those policies are described informally introducing ambiguities, which hinders the precise implementation of DDS. To address this, we formalize the descriptions of DDS QoS policies using the object constraint language (OCL). We also clearly defined the design structural relations among DDS entities and QoS policies. In the process, we analyzed the dependencies among QoS policies and we built clear and concise structural relations. We then proposed feature modeling and a management layer to facilitate QoS tuning and to reduce development and configuration complexity. We implemented the proposed approach in a simulated power consumption domain. The results show that the approach improves the development process. They also show that the approach significantly improves the performance of DDS-enabled applications.