Specification of a Remote Monitoring Protocol
Antti Siirilä · Theseus (Ammattikorkeakoulujen) · 2010
The purpose of this bachelor’s thesis was to specify a generic data communication protocol for remotely performed condition monitoring purposes in service business. The remote monitoring system includes a vast number of reporting client devices and a single centralized or several decentralized monitoring centre(s). The reporting client devices are capable of independently determining their condition using a self-diagnostics system and reporting the results to the monitoring centre. Information transfer within the system is done over a private IP network that combines wireless mobile telecommunication and mobile operator backbone networks. The thesis is divided in three logical sections. The first section describes the remote monitoring system and specifies the requirements for the Remote Monitoring Protocol (RMP). The second section discusses the system specific network technologies and introduces the protocol engineering method relevant for RMP. The third section includes the specification and the demonstration of RMP. The functional requirements for RMP were specified as follows: Mutual authentication between the client and the RMC gateway, the client must perform registration to a pre-defined remote monitoring centre, the client devices shall be able to download configuration parameters from the remote monitoring centre, the client shall immediately report the faults and warning and status changes once occurred, the client must send a Bill-of-Material (BOM) message to Remote Monitoring Server (RMS) when requested, and the client shall disable itself if the authorized RMC is not found within a configurable time. RMP was specified to follow the layered protocol model located on top of the UDP/IP stack and providing an Application Programming Interface (API) for the client and server applications. RMP can be driven in reliable and unreliable packet exchange modes. In addition, RMP specification includes the message structures and the exchange procedures for communication between the analyzer application and the remote monitoring server. Furthermore, RMP supports message sizes up to 64 KB and offers fragmentation and reassembling services for the messages passing the configured path Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) size. RMP features also include the automatic discovery of the path MTU size. As conclusion, the functionality and features of the RMP specification were demonstrated in a reference implementation. The implementation was carried out in JAVA using the Eclipse development environment.