Comprehensive Practical Evaluation of Wired and Wireless Internet Base Smart Grid Communication

Internet based communications is a key solution for enabling low-cost and scalable communication infrastructure for different applications of the Smart Grid. However, the performance of this network needs to be evaluated practically in the context of smart grid applications based on key metrics such as
latency and reliability. This paper is a comprehensive evaluation of the United Kingdom internet network characteristics which will allow a smart grid systems designer to consider essential parameters for communication applications. This paper will focus on three smart grid applications, but also the outcome of this
research is also relevant to a wider range of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Different combinations of off-the-shelf wired and wireless last-mile communication technologies are evaluated using, real-world transport protocols such as the Transport Control Protocol (TCP)and the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). The performance of TCP/UDP has been tested in a realistic client-server communication testbed. The results from extensive evaluations show that typical latency values are between 200 ms to 600 ms for data packets from 50 bytes to 10 kbytes short control packets. Moreover, by applying data compression techniques the results can be improved 5-20% for different last mile communications.