Cloud IEC 61850: DDS Performance in Virtualized Environment with OpenDDS

The idea of using Virtualization and Cloud as the underlying infrastructure for future automation systems in the context of the Internet of Things has been presented in the literature. This paper presents the assessment of the end-to-end performance of a distributed and virtualized architecture from the DDS communication middleware layer, running the performance test benchmark applications of the OpenDDS implementation. The experimental distributed and virtualized environment used considers two ordinary physical hosts connected by a single network. The virtualization layer is realized with KVM as hosted hypervisor with Ubuntu Linux and TinyCore as Guest-OS. A set of test scenarios combining host-host, host-VM and VM-VM communications is defined. Each test consist of publishing circa 11 thousand messages of 250 bytes for each one of the different transport protocol supported by OpenDDS. The round-trip time is measured for each message or sample, from which the respective latency and jitter are calculated. The results obtained are presented in tabular and graphical formats. The results show that soft real-time applications with deadlines up to 1 ms could be run in such virtualized environment. We show that is reasonable to consider the potential of running automation applications on a distributed and virtualized environment. The contribution of this study is to provide information, based on the proposed reference architecture and its time characterization, to engineers responsible for the design of automation solutions to start considering and assessing the use of modern computing architectures and technologies, specially virtualization and communication middlewares, in new engineering projects.