Communication technology plays an increasingly important role in the growing automated metering infrastructure (AMI) market. This paper presents a thorough analysis and comparison of four application layer protocols in the smart metering context. The inspected protocols are DLMS/COSEM, the Smart Message Language (SML), and the MMS and SOAP mappings of IEC 61850. The focus of this paper is on their use over TCP/IP. The protocols are first compared with respect to qualitative criteria such as the ability to transmit clock synchronization information. Afterwards the message size of meter reading requests and responses and the different binary encodings of the protocols are compared

As distributed energy resources are growing in number it becomes increasingly important to efficiently integrate them in a communication network to monitor and control them. Many envision IEC 61850 to be the best communication solution in this field. But the standard is still far from a plug and play setup. One step in this direction is the modeling of vendor independent IEC 61850 profiles for different kinds of DER. This paper analyzes the modeling of such a profile for intelligent energy management of micro-CHP systems. It discusses common system structures, control hierarchies, and control use cases. Finally it proposes a profile that could be implemented by all micro-CHP vendors to allow easy integration of their devices in an energy management system

This article provides an overview of requirements and implementation issues for specific Smart Grid applications of narrow-bandwidth wireless IP networks. Since the selected applications are very security sensitive, special attention is given to the implementation of security services

As the number of distributed energy resources increases so does the need for sophisticated communication technology that allows to remotely control them. This study analyzes the prominent application‐layer protocol candidate for this application, the IEC 61850 standard. A decision tree is drawn that outlines when IEC 61850 is a favorable choice. Afterwards IEC 61850 is looked at in detail. The benefits of its device modeling capabilities for interoperability are evaluated and its message size is analyzed.

While the communication standard IEC 61850 is already established in the area of substation automation, its use to control and monitor distributed energy resources (DER) is still in the early stages. An open discussion on design and performance issues of IEC 61850 implementations could boost its use for DER. This paper presents the architectural design decisions made in an open implementation of the standard in Java. In addition several performance aspects of IEC 61850 MMS server implementations are analyzed. The overhead caused by the OSI layers in MMS communication is analyzed with respect to PDU size and CPU load. The open implementation is profiled in order to point out where optimization in IEC 61850 implementations are most useful. Finally the performance of this implementation is compared to that of a commercial stack written in the C language