Multi-Platform Connection

There are multiple ways to establish connection between external VOLTTRON platforms. Given that VOLTTRON now supports ZeroMq and RabbitMQ type of message bus with each using different type authentication mechanism, the number of different ways that agents can connect to external platforms has significantly increased. Various multi-platform deployment scenarios will be covered in this section.

  1. Agents can directly connect to external platforms to send and receive messages. Forward historian, Data Mover agents fall under this category. The deployment steps for forward historian is described in Forward Historian Deployment and data mover historian in DataMover Historian Deployment

  2. The platforms maintain the connection with other platforms and agents can send to and receive messages from external platforms without having to establish connection directly. The deployment steps is described in Multi Platform Router Deployment

  3. RabbitMQ has ready made plugins such as shovel and federation to connect to external brokers. This feature is leveraged to make connections to external platforms. This is described in Multi Platform RabbitMQ Deployment

  4. A web based admin interface to authenticate multiple instances (ZeroMq or RabbitMQ) wanting to connect to single central instance is now available. The deployment steps is described in Multi Platform Multi-Bus Deployment

  5. VOLTTRON Central is a platform management web application that allows platforms to communicate and to be managed from a centralized server. The deployment steps is described in VOLTTRON Central Demo

Assumptions

  • Data Collector is the deployment box that has the drivers and is collecting data from devices which will be forwarded to a VOLTTRON Central.

  • Volttron Central (VC) is the deployment box that has the historian which will save data from all Data Collectors to the central database.

  • VOLTTRON_HOME is assumed to the default on both boxes (/home/<user>/.volttron).

Note

VOLTTRON_HOME is the directory used by the platform for managing state and configuration of the platform and agents installed locally on the platform. Auth keys, certificates, the configuration store, etc. are stored in this directory by the platform.