Smart grid communication infrastructure comparison-for distributed control of distributed energy resources using internet of things devices

Communication between distributed energy resources and aggregators is necessary to improve the efficiency of power use and solve stability issues. For the communication, the probability of delivery for measurements and control commands, determines the possible power system services. The probability of delivery is determined by the processing units, data connection, middleware, and serialization.

The comparison is made based on multiple experimental setups to test the performance of different middleware and serialization with different processing units and data connections in a Smart Grid context. The hardware includes Beagle Bones, Raspberry Pi's, and Dell laptops processing units, and the data connection bandwidths include 1, 10, 100 and 1000 Mbit/s.

The results show that there are better alternatives to XMPP and Web Services middleware and XML serialization as advocated for by the prevalent communication standards. The paper gives guidance in choosing the best software and hardware for communication depending on the use case.