Data transmission of IEEE1888 communication for wide-area real-time smart grid applications

The increasing demand for Renewable Energy Sources like solar and wind power opens up adoption of Web services communications for wide-area and real-time smart grid applications. Since the behavior of web services with TCP/IP is stochastic, detailed characteristics of data transmission delay should be investigated for time-constraint smart grid communications. In this paper, we have chosen a new Web services standard IEEE1888 as the protocol for soft-real-time applications such as Automated Demand Response (ADR) aggregation. The statistical distribution of data transmission delay was measured using our emulator experiments and NS2 network simulations. We found that the variation of delay sometimes reaches more than ten times of the average in the cases of heavy packet loss rate. Although the IEEE1888 is better than conventional protocols, attentions on time-out occurrence should be paid for the smart grid web services communications.