Smart Eagle: advanced external monitoring of heterogeneous networks
Bram Scheidegger · Repository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich) · 2013
The energy sector is undergoing major changes including a trend towards possibly isolated parts of the grid (microgrid) with small power plants producing electrical energy from renewable sources, leading to an unpredictable availability of electricity.To balance the network load, the communication between consumers, producers, sensors and other devices is vital.The backbone of such a self-regulating infrastructure is the data network comprised of various very different network types.Despite the importance of the data network, there are currently no vendor independent analysis and management tools available tailored for such networks.We present Smart Eagle, a distributed network analysis and monitoring tool capable of dealing with building automation and low-rate wireless personal area networks.We report on our experience in taking measurements for such networks and introduce the architecture of Smart Eagle.We were able to gather meaningful measurements from both network types without changing the underlying network infrastructure.The evaluation shows that our measurement techniques are comparable or better than tools covering one technology only.Furthermore, we feel that our model and architecture fits the microgrid requirements well, laying the cornerstone to add support for even more network types.10