A Comparison of Application Layer Communication Protocols in IoT-enabled Smart Grid

The modern smart grid consists of the classical power grid augmented with a large-scale ICT and renewable energy integration. An indispensable part of the implementation of such grid is IoT, a system built by integrating internet-connectivity into all kinds of plant, equipment and devices in smart grid. It provides a reliable, real-time communication among applications running on different IoT devices and on cloud or edge infrastructures. To this end, it establishes communication channels by using application protocols for IoT devices. However, to provide effective communication between its devices, it is necessary that an IoT-enabled smart grid uses suitable application protocol regards specific terms, such as minimal traffic load and delivery latency. In order to build an IoT-enabled smart grid which will support the most efficient data flow in the above-mentioned terms, we made an experimental analysis of the communication based on the three most commonly used application protocols: HTTP, MQTT and AMQP. The experiment has been conducted using IoT devices, which are a part of a real Microgrid-IoT laboratory.