A scalable and distributed electrical power monitoring system utilizing cloud computing

Abstract

This paper proposes a scalable and distributed electrical power monitoring system utilizing cloud computing. This system collects power usage at measurement points geographically distributed over different locations, stores data on the cloud and provides a single unified view of power usage through a simple REST API. A system with 620 measurement points covering a server room and a clean room has been successfully installed at our campus, and we have operated it since the third quarter of 2011 to charge electricity bills and evaluate the power efficiency of data processing middleware. We have demonstrated that the proposed system can be smoothly scaled out based on the needs. This result provides an insight that cloud computing makes a power monitoring system elastic and cost-effective. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.