Intercloud Communication for Value-Added Smart Home and Smart Grid Services

Abstract

The increasingly decentralized generation of renewable energy enables value-added smart home and smart grid (SHSG) services. The device data on which those services rely are often stored in clouds of different vendors. Usually, the vendors’ clouds all offer their own service interfaces. It is increasingly challenging for service providers to access the data from all these clouds. Hence, each cloud forms a data silo, where users’ device data are captured. Intercloud computing is one suggested approach to solve this uprising vendor silo problem. Introducing a standardized service interface and simply interconnecting the clouds can easily result in an unnecessary communication overhead. Compared to other domains applying Intercloud computing, the device data in the SHSG domain has special characteristics. These characteristics should be considered for the design of an appropriate communication architecture. Thus, the focus of this research is on an efficient communication for discovering and delivering device data in an SHSG Intercloud scenario. Therefore, we present an architecture introducing an Intercloud Service (ICS) on top of the vendor clouds. An evaluation methodology is proposed to investigate the efficiency of the chosen solution for the ICS.