Smart grid communication comparison: Distributed control middleware and serialization comparison for the Internet of Things

To solve the problems caused by intermittent renewable energy production, communication between Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) and system operators is necessary. The communication middleware and serialization used for communication are essential to ensure delivery of the messages within the required timeframe, to provide the necessary ancillary services to the power grid. This paper shows that there are better alternatives to using Web Services and XMPP as middleware and that there are better alternatives than using XML for serialization. The paper also gives guidance at choosing the best communication middleware and serialization format/library, aided by the authors' earlier work, which investigates the performance and characteristics of communication middleware and serialization independently. Given the performance criteria of the paper, ZeroMQ, YAMI4, and ICE are the middleware that performs the best, and ProtoBuf (ProtoStuff), and ProtoStuff are the serialization that performs the best.