Exprivia and Wind: remote control is security

Considering the number of subscribers, it is the third largest mobile telephone operator and the second largest fixed telephone operator in Italy. The company operates under the Wind brand for mobile telephony and Infostrada for fixed, broadband and optical fibre telephony.

The needs
Wind needed to set up telecommunications infrastructure for remote control, through the exchange of SMS messages, modems assembled on board systems that generate electricity from renewable sources such as photovoltaic and wind power systems. The system also had to guarantee the security of the electrical power system to which these plants are connected and prevent potentially critical situations.

WIND commissioned Exprivia to design and produce the components for the SMS Gateway functions for sending/receiving SMS and the web portal for reporting on and managing the provisioning flows, the registration status of the SIMs on the GSM network, unreachability and cover statistics of the mobile network.

The design
After an analysis of the requirements, the solution offered by Exprivia consisted in developing a software platform made up of two distinct modules:

1) DMS (Direct Message Sender) component, which provides and manages the interfacing service between the end user's IT systems and the WIND operator’s network platforms, for the transmission, reception and storage of SMS. DMS is a proprietary platform with certified interoperability with the Wind "SMS-Gate" service using the UCP protocol. The platform is currently in operation at the sites of numerous Wind customers.
This component was extended to manage communication via SOAP web services with SCADA.

2) Management System Component, which provides and manages the ETL (Extract Transform Load), BI (Business Intelligence) and Web Portal services on identification data, GSM service status and SMS reporting.

The results obtained
The solution produced has enabled end customers to reliably manage detachments and reattachments of the production plants.

With the solution provided, the remote control centre operators can manage single transmissions of SMS and/or SMS campaigns in real time and/or based on a schedule.

The system can manage an SMS transmission and reception rate of 100 SMS/s.

By accessing the web interface, the operators can:

• view information in aggregate form (for example, the total number of registered SIM cards) shown using dashboards;
• run searches on the single SMS sent and/or received from the operations centres or self-producers and view detailed information in tabular form, exportable to the most common formats (csv, pdf and excel);
• run searches on the status of a given SIM card and view the details in tabular form;
• access the registration information and the history of the disconnections from the GSM service of each self-producer.