Open Access

The communication technologies for automatic me-ter reading (smart metering) and for energy production and distribution networks (smart grid) have the potential to be one of the first really highly scaled machine-to-machine-(M2M)-applications. During the last years two very promising devel-opments around the wireless part of smart grid communication were initialized, which possibly have an impact on the markets far beyond Europe and far beyond energy automation. Besides the specifications of the Open Metering System (OMS) Group, the German Federal Office for Information Security (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, BSI) has designed a protection profile (PP) and a technical directive (TR) for the communication unit of an intelligent measurement sys-tem (smart meter gateway), which were released in March 2013. This design uses state-of-the-art technologies and prescribes their implementation in real-life systems. At first sight the expenditures for the prescribed solutions seem to be significant. But in the long run, this path is inevitable and comes with strategic advantages.

Android is an operating system which was developed for use in smart mobile phones and is the current leader in this market. A lot of efforts are being spent to make Android available to the embedded world, as well. Many embedded systems do not have a local GUI and are therefore called headless devices. This paper presents the results of an analysis of the general suitability of Anroid in headless embedded systems and ponders the advantages and disadvantages. It focuses on the hardware related issues, i.e. to what extent Android supports hardware peripherals normally used in embedded systems.