In the rapidly evolving landscape of energy infrastructure, CSG Digital Grid Research Institute is at the forefront of innovation. Facing the immense challenge of managing millions of smart grid devices, the company partnered with EMQ to build a robust, scalable, and secure operations and maintenance (O&M) platform. This collaboration has not only revolutionized their approach to smart grid management but also set a new standard for efficiency and reliability in the industry.
The Challenge: Scaling Smart Grid Management to Millions of Devices
CSG Digital Grid Research Institute leverages IoT, AI, and edge computing to deploy smart terminals—including meters, circuit breakers, sensors, and cameras—across transmission, substation, and distribution systems. This creates a comprehensive intelligent inspection solution that continuously monitors grid operations. However, as the number of connected devices surged past the million mark and rapidly approached ten million, the existing infrastructure faced significant hurdles:
- Massive, Distributed Deployments: Millions of IoT smart terminals are spread across vast geographical areas, demanding a cloud-edge collaborative management capability for distributed access, unified monitoring, and dynamic scaling.
- High Concurrency and Integration Complexities: With over a million terminals in some regions, supporting message concurrency exceeding 500,000 per second and ensuring reliable, stable, and efficient integration with the smart O&M platform became critical.
- Stringent Data Security Requirements: Handling sensitive data related to grid operations, maintenance, and user consumption necessitated robust security measures for device access and data transmission, adhering to strict network security protocols.
The Solution: EMQX Multi-Cluster and Cloud-Edge Collaboration
After a thorough analysis of their requirements, CSG Digital Grid Research Institute devised an innovative distributed access architecture for power intelligent O&M IoT, built upon their existing network infrastructure. They adopted EMQX multi-cluster distributed deployment and ECP cloud-edge collaborative solutions. This strategy enabled distributed access, unified monitoring, and dynamic scaling for IoT smart terminals across various regions, culminating in a central O&M platform capable of managing tens of millions of devices.
The implemented solution features:
- Multi-Cluster Distributed Deployment: By deploying lightweight EMQX Enterprise clusters at headquarters and various production zones, the company established localized access for IoT smart terminals. EMQX's flexible architecture allows for dynamic scaling, accommodating 1 to 10 million device connections per region based on server resource adjustments.
- Secure Terminal Access: The solution supports standard SSL and a national cryptographic algorithm, offering flexible encryption options for secure data transmission. EMQX also provides enhanced authentication features based on SCRAM, meeting the need for more complex and reliable MQTT connections.
- High-Efficiency Data Integration: EMQX Enterprise offers stable and efficient data integration interfaces, capable of pushing over one million messages per second to Kafka. This ensures that massive volumes of O&M data from smart terminals are reported to the central O&M platform in seconds, enabling unified monitoring and management.
- Unified Cloud-Edge Management: The deployment of the ECP cloud-edge collaboration management platform at headquarters provides a unified web-based interface. This allows for dynamic management of EMQX cluster licenses, centralized O&M monitoring, alert pushing, and alert rule configuration across the entire lifecycle.
The Results: Improved Efficiency, Reduced Costs, and Enhanced Security
The implementation of the EMQX multi-cluster solution has delivered significant improvements for CSG Digital Grid Research Institute:
- 35%+ Improvement in Project Development Efficiency: EMQX Enterprise's intuitive configuration interface enabled the engineering teams to rapidly develop and integrate IoT smart terminal access across all production zones, significantly shortening project delivery cycles.
- 25%+ Reduction in Project Deployment and O&M Costs: The lightweight cluster deployment of EMQX Enterprise, combined with dynamic license management and unified monitoring via the ECP cloud-edge platform, substantially reduced overall deployment and O&M costs.
- 60%+ Improvement in Secure Access Development Efficiency: EMQX's MQTT SDK (NanoSDK) supports integration with cryptographic chips and software. Additionally, EMQX's support for SCRAM-based MQTT enhanced authentication drastically improved the efficiency of developing secure access mechanisms for IoT smart terminals.
Looking Ahead
The successful deployment of the EMQX multi-cluster solution has empowered CSG Digital Grid Research Institute to overcome the challenges of connecting tens of millions of smart grid devices. This comprehensive IoT solution facilitates ubiquitous connectivity, pervasive intelligence, and platform empowerment across the entire grid. As this architecture expands to other provincial production zones, it will establish a two-tier management structure (headquarters smart O&M platform - provincial smart O&M platforms), further enhancing the smart O&M and digital management capabilities across the entire network.