But the electricity, gas and water meters and modules in Itron's OpenWay Riva IoT solution are more than just smart meters, sensors or communications modules. OpenWay Riva embeds the equivalent computing power of a smart phone or desktop computer in every device, enabling real-time analysis of high-resolution data at the edge of the network.

This eliminates latency and avoids any loss of data resolution during transfer over the network. OpenWay Riva also provides a robust distributed computing platform architected using open standards to run “apps” on meters and other edge devices, thereby unleashing a growing ecosystem of new providers to innovate on the platform—metering simply becomes one of the apps that these devices run.

OpenWay Riva’s distributed computing platform also enables an increasingly diverse ecosystem of grid devices, sensors and assets—ranging from smart meters to IoT sensors, all able to utilize peer-to-peer communications to share data and collaborate in real time to solve problems at the edge of the network as conditions change. That means a smart meter or grid sensor can talk directly to a distribution automation controller, to an inverter on a solar panel or to a remote valve control on a gas or water pipeline. This type of self-directed device interaction has always been central to the vision of a smart distribution grid but never possible—until now.