LIFE.net over Web: An advanced monitoring protocol for UPS systems

The remote monitoring and control of UPS devices performed remotely by control centers is a commonly adopted solution to limit required human interventions on site. Nowadays, the most usually adopted communication link is still represented by Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) lines, which offer relatively limited bandwidth at relatively high economic costs. The paper proposes a novel control center communication solution for UPS devices that exploits Internet-based connectivity instead of PSTN lines. The Internet represents a widely accepted standard; its adoption as communication infrastructure relevantly simplifies the management and integration of UPS monitoring solutions with other Internet-based systems and tools. For instance, it facilitates the provisioning of UPS information via standard Web browsers, possibly integrated with other customer-related data, such as billing information. In addition, the Internet exploitation allows the transmission of great amounts of monitoring data, thus enabling fine-grained control, at reasonable economic costs. In particular, the proposed solution is based on the encapsulation of standard UPS data and commands inside Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) packets, exchanged between UPS devices residing inside enterprise networks and a HTTP server located in France at the edge of the Chloride private network. By exploiting HTTP as encapsulating protocol, there is the positive side effect of overcoming usually adopted enterprise security policies, which limit network traffic between local and remote nodes, thus facilitating the deployment in enterprise scenarios with no intervention on usual security settings. The paper reports implementation details that point out the feasibility of the proposed solution, in relation both to the client side capability to perform on microcontrollers with limited resources and to the server side to properly scale when managing large numbers of simultaneous clients.