Abstract
The increasing strain on ageing generation infrastructure has seen more frequent instances of scheduled and unscheduled blackouts, rising reliability on fossil fuel based energy alternatives and a slow down in efforts towards achieving universal access to electrical energy in South Africa. To try and relieve the burden on the National Grid and still progress electrification activities, the smart microgrid model and secure energy trade paradigm is considered—enabled by the Industrial IoT (IIoT) and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). Given the high availability requirements of microgrid operations, the limited resources available on IIoT devices and the high processing and energy requirements of DLT operations, this work aims to determine the effect of native DLT algorithms when implemented on IIoT edge devices to assess the suitability of DLTs as a mechanism to establish a secure, energy trading market for the Internet of Energy. Metrics such as the node transaction time, operating temperature, power consumption, processor and memory usage are considered towards determining possible interference on the edge node operation. In addition, the cost and time required for mining operations associated with the DLT-enabled node are determined in an effort to predict the cost to end users—in terms of fees payable and mobile data costs—as well as predicting the microgrid’s growth and potential blockchain network slowdown.
Highlights
The following sections discuss the results generated from the conducted experiments in the contexts of the goals of the feasibility study to identify and propose design considerations for the energy marketplace, set a baseline of operational metrics for distributed ledger technologies (DLTs)-enabled edge device performance, identify the limitations of using DLTs in Industrial IoT (IIoT) application spaces such as security vulnerabilities and the socio-economic and infrastructural climate of rural communities and highlight edge device platform compatibility restrictions that influence the design of the smart controller device
As one of the technologies identified for the secure, transactive microgrid market, DLTs would be subject to meeting the standard requirements for availability
To determine its suitability for operation at the IIoT edge, performance evaluation and stress tests were performed on a Raspberry Pi 3 acting as an Ethereum node
Summary
Given the high availability requirements of microgrid operations, the limited resources available on IIoT devices and the high processing and energy requirements of DLT operations, this work aims to determine the effect of native DLT algorithms when implemented on IIoT edge devices to assess the suitability of DLTs as a mechanism to establish a secure, energy trading market for the Internet of Energy. This work aims to conduct a feasibility study in order to assess the capabilities of native DLT algorithms when run in the IIoT context. This work aims to establish the feasibility of a DLT-enabled secure, transactive energy market by highlighting how DLT solutions perform in the IIoT context when implemented on a low power device intended for use at the network edge and where memory, processing and energy resources are highly limited. By conducting the performance analysis after enabling DLT and smart contract functionality on a commonly used edge device and evaluating the results against the operational restrictions required of an IIoT real-time network, this work aims to identify areas in which DLT would not perform adequately in its native state highlighting the incompleteness of DLTs as a solution for the secure energy marketplace
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