Implementing prosumer-to-prosumer communication in the German smart meter infrastructure

The progressive expansion of distributed energy resources and the increasing number of flexible energy consumption devices necessitate new approaches for controlling these components. Residential homes, which were previously limited to consuming energy, are becoming prosumers through the adoption of photovoltaics and battery storage systems. Monitoring, controlling, and optimizing these systems can be achieved using home energy management systems. Germany is currently rolling out the Smart-Meter-Gateway, which offers a standardized communication interface for grid control and interaction with home energy management systems and smart-metering systems. In this work, we implement and evaluate a communication concept that enables prosumer-to-prosumer communication within the current technical guidelines. Our results demonstrate that prosumer-to-prosumer communication is feasible within the smart meter infrastructure, although it requires an external market participant to act as a proxy for message routing. Our evaluation encompasses both the connection establishment process and the transmission of messages of varying sizes between different actors. We describe our implementation of this concept and present results obtained using real hardware.