Final Remarks - Integration of Iot technologies into the Smart Grid

Sensors
2022
,
22
, 2475
15 of 17
Some considerations may be outlined as final remarks, as follows.
A very important question to be considered is whether the implementation of the
proposed platform is worthwhile and if the advantages it provides counterbalance or
exceed its (potential) complexity. The proposal presents an architecture made up of a few
entities, some of which are already available; the RESTful Web Service Interface, the IEC
61850 Client inside the Middleware, and the external MQTT Broker may be realized using
open-source software tools available on the web with very limited effort (as undertaken
in this paper). The main effort to develop the proposed platform may be relevant to the
realization of the Middleware (except for the IEC 61850 Client module). The development
of the prototype realized by the authors verified that implementation issues relating to
Middleware are not critical or complex. Furthermore, the availability of this platform has
the advantage to allow a generic application based on REST and using MQTT and JSON
protocols to access whatever information is maintained by an IEC 61850 Server. The most
important thing to remember is that this access does not require any knowledge of the
IEC 61850 standard nor any need to use the IEC 61850 communication stack. The authors
believe that this feature is very important to enable integration of the Smart Grid with
the IoT.
Another important consideration relates to the potential limits of the proposal. The
authors believe that the proposal presented here may feature two limitations, pointed out
as follows.
According to the proposal, the access to IEC 61850 Servers from a generic RESTful-
based application must be realized through the IEC 61850 Web Platform; this dependency
may be considered a limitation, although it is a very common solution when a mapping
from specific standard protocols to the web must be realized. Furthermore, the advantages
introduced by the proposed solution, as noted previously, are enough to counterbalance
this limitation.
The other limitation of the proposal is related to the security issue. As explained in the
paper, the security mechanisms implemented in the platform are user registration and user
authentication. Use of the IEC 61850 Web Platform by a Web User may occur only after
registration by the user with their relevant credentials (username and password). User
authentication occurs after registration, and is based on the use of a signed token received
by the user after the authentication request, to be used in each of the next web service
synchronous requests issued to the IEC 61850 Web Platform. As specified in Section
5
, the
standard JSON Web Token was used for the Web User authentication [
29
]. The literature
presents a huge number of papers dealing with the security in web service-based scenarios
such as that considered in this paper; the reader may refer to [
36
–
38
], for example. Due to
the set of secure solutions available in the current literature, and considering that security
was not the main focus of this paper, the authors preferred to limit the security to the
mechanisms described previously. In a real application of the proposed solution, one of the
many available solutions may be adopted to improve the secure access to the platform.