Communication Protocol Design for IoT-Enabled Energy Management in a Smart Microgrid

In this paper, a new communication protocol is proposed to allow direct communication between internet of things (IoT)-enabled home energy management systems (HEMSs) in a smart microgrid. The direct communication features are an important attribute for decentralised demand management and local energy trading operations in a microgrid equipped with renewable energy resources. The proposed scheme utilises the intermediate HEMSs as relay nodes that forward the sum of the received signals from nearby HEMSs to both ends of the entire network. The scheme can achieve lower latency compared to the cases when HEMSs adopt direct decode−and−forward (DF) or transmit through the central controller. For the proposed protocol, we have analytically obtained expressions for the error probability at different HEMSs, as well as the average bit error rate (BER) to indicate the overall error performance of the microgrid communication. To evaluate the proposed protocol in different channel conditions, numerical simulation is performed. The results demonstrate that the channel conditions between the HEMSs at the middle of the network have a greater impact on the system error performance. Overall, it can be observed that the proposed protocol suffers a lower degradation in error performance in comparison to direct DF when one of the users experiences worse channel conditions.