Distributed Computing at the Edge: A Modular Small-Scale Architecture for Smart Grid Energy Systems

The explosive increase in sensory equipment for the gathering of data in recent years has pushed computing resources to their limits and has created the need for a more decentralized approach in Big Data Analytics. The term Edge Computing refers to this new paradigm where computation is performed away from the traditional cloud, in a more distributed manner and physically closer to the actual gathering of data. However, in large scale applications like an energy smart grid system spanning entire cities, there are many challenges that need to be faced for such a system to perform effectively, namely the continuous communication and exchange of information between heterogeneous edge devices, sensors and actuators, and the division of devices in spatial clusters that need to perform special operations depending on the characteristics of the area. The aim of this paper is to provide a small-scale conceptual architecture for the communication of clusters of edge devices in a smart grid system, using the actor model and the AKKA framework as a communication backbone.