Containerization: For Over-the-Air Programming of Field Deployed Internet-of-Energy Based on Cost Effective LPWAN

Containerization is widely investigated as a secure and lightweight virtualization solution. They have outclassed the traditional virtual machines (VMs) architecture in the cloud because of having built-in capabilities to provide platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to the edge devices. Containers consume less hardware resource, scalable and provide faster patch times, thus they have been suggested as a solution for more practical and real-time virtualization resource in energy utilities. Containers can be used as a replacement for VMs because the main feature of the modern cloud architecture, i.e. workloads are able to utilize shared hardware resources that are provided across all data-center nodes for any purpose. This article reviews the implementation architecture of the containers for energy sector applications, i.e. next-generation substation automation systems. Moreover, we analysed the power consumed by the edge devices, based on the low power wide area network (LPWAN), for over-the-air programming through containers. In addition, we studied the success factors of containers, by considering specific used-cases and explain the benefits of using containers over traditional VMs.