Performance Comparison of Communication Protocols in Residential Load Monitoring System
Abstract
A load monitoring system is essential for ensuring effective electricity usage by providing information that alerts consumers to take appropriate energy-saving measures. Current systems rely on aggregated power consumption data, normally collected at the entrance of residential houses. While cost-effective, these systems do not provide comprehensive data on individual appliance usage. Therefore, multiple-load monitoring devices are required to track the power consumption of all household appliances. The main challenge in using multiple devices is integrating them wirelessly while maintaining high data synchronization. Three communication protocols, namely, universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter (UART), Espressif now (ESPNOW) and network time protocol (NTP), were compared to evaluate their performance in data synchronization. Each monitoring device, installed at individual appliance, consists of a PZEM-004T sensor module for measuring electrical parameters and an ESP32 micro-controller for processing and transmitting data to ThinSpeak for storage and display. The results show that NTP achieves the lowest error with an RMSE of 1.22, followed by UART with RMSE of 2.11. However, data transmission via ESPNOW was unsuccessful due to limitations with ThingSpeak. In conclusion, NTP is a suitable low-cost solution for multiple-load monitoring systems requiring high data synchronization.