Assessment of Communication Technologies for a Home Energy Management System

Design of an effective home energy management (HEM) system requires selection of an appropriate communication technology. The objective of this paper is to compare commonly used communication technologies for HEM implementation in a premises area network, in terms of their latency, throughput, reliability, power consumption and implementation costs. Communication technologies of interest include ZigBee, Wi-Fi and Ethernet. These technologies are simulated in OPNET. This paper compares the performance of selected communication technologies using two communication schemes, i.e., Always-on and Turn-on-in-loop. It also analyzes the impact of the number of devices being controlled by the HEM on the technology performance.