A light-weight metering file system for sustainable real-time meter data management

A real-time smart metering system has strict requirements, since every piece of data gathered from various meters every hour is of importance, and each component consisting of metering infrastructure should be sustainable. Therefore, it is necessary to efficiently manage the meter data set in smart metering networks as well as in a server. Therefore, we propose a dedicated file system, a LIght-weight Metering File System (LIMFS), which is capable of not only efficiently storing and searching meter data but also performing distributed fault-tolerant meter data management for real-time smart meter devices. The proposed LIMFS exploits accumulated data sliding storage (ADSS) for lost data recovery and latest-first error-ignorant data management (LEDM) to reduce memory wastage, coping with dynamic report interval. Experimental results demonstrate that LIMFS has as a small enough overhead to be considered negligible, and provides flexible memory capacity according to dynamic report interval, in spite of lost data recovery functionality.