DHT based SCADA architecture

Abstract

The intense push toward the Internet of Everything (IoE) paradigm, and the desire to raise the level of efficiency of socio-technical systems engineering, entails reconsidering a traditional SCADA system. Any sort of intelligence in system behavior should start with high quality data, and this is where SCADA plays the central role. Data is necessarily coupled with facilities to process and store them, and SCADA's capabilities must be in par with such elevated expectations pertaining to overall system behavior. The goal of this paper is to propose a modern and novel data handling approach in a SCADA system. The aim is to boost data storage and retrieval performance to seek out extra opportunities for finding patterns and clues in data. The overarching goal is to build the next generation of SCADA based solutions, that would deliver the promises embraced by IoE. Our proposal revolves around the usage of distributed hash tables to disseminate data, and switch from a classical relational database model toward the one utilized by many NoSQL databases. The paper contains both the description of an architecture as well as implementation considerations related to a new SCADA system. The paper concludes with a summary of further research directions that needs to be addressed for a production ready variant.