Fault Tolerant CII Middle ware for Wide Area Monitoring ,Control and Protection in Realistic Operational Environments

Abstract: Fault tolerance and dependability are of high importance to the information infrastructure that supports and controls the operation of the Critical Infrastructure such as the electrical power grid and telecommunication systems due to their vital role in the proper function of society and economy. This thesis examines GridStat, an established middleware approach for providing fault tolerance and dependability and performs a constructive evaluation of its architectural design. It, then, builds upon this approach providing an enhanced solution, Pe- GridStat that uses peer to peer networks to overcome a number of the inherent shortcomings and thus offers a better degree of fault tolerance. The architecture of the proposed approach is discussed in detail where it is shown that the proposed approach which mitigates by design the shortcomings of the original one regarding fault tolerance and availability. A comparative and qualitative evaluation of the original and the proposed approaches is performed using a realistic infrastructure , the power transmission network of New Zealand. This evaluation reveals that apart from addressing the aforementioned issues, the proposed approach offers also improvements with regards to timeliness requirements and imposed overhead to the underlying communication networks.