Smart Grid communication middleware comparison distributed control comparison for the internet of things

Communication between Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) is necessary to efficiently solve the intermittency issues caused by renewable energy, using DER power grid auxiliary services, primarily load shifting and shedding. The middleware used for communication determines which services are possible by their performance, which is limited by the middleware characteristics, primarily interchangeable serialization and the Publish-Subscribe messaging pattern. The earlier paper "Smart Grid Serialization Comparison" (Petersen et al. 2017) AIDS in the choice of serialization, which has a big impact on the performance of the communication as a whole. This paper identifies the dis-/advantages of the different middleware, shows that there are better alternatives to Web Services and XMPP, and gives guidance in choosing the most appropriate middleware depending on the context. YAMI4 and ZeroMQ are generally the strongest candidates for Smart Grid distributed control, but WAMP should also be considered in the future.