Performance Analysis of ANSI C12.22 Protocol for Secure Smart Meter Communication in Advanced Metering Infrastructure

With the rapid growth of smart grid infrastructure, secure and efficient communication between smart meters and utility servers has become crucial. The exchange of metering data, control commands, and real-time diagnostics demands robust protocols that ensure both reliability and cybersecurity. In this context, ANSI C12.22 has emerged as a standard for facilitating encrypted, addressable communications over public networks between utility backends and metering endpoints. This paper presents a practical implementation and evaluation of the ANSI C12.22 protocol, a standard designed for transporting metering data over IP-based networks. We emulate a real-world utility-to-smart meter communication setup using a high-level supervisory control node and an ARM-based node configured as a smart meter device. A secure end-to-end communication framework was developed, incorporating AES-based encryption and table-based data exchange as defined by ANSI C12.22. To assess network-level performance, we captured the packet exchange using Wireshark and analyzed the communication behavior in depth. Metrics such as Round Trip Time (RTT), throughput, request-response sizes, and inter-request gaps were extracted and visualized. The results reveal insights into latency trends, protocol efficiency, and message pacing under encrypted transactions. Our work demonstrates a low-cost, reproducible testbed for evaluating smart meter protocols, providing a valuable reference for both research and industrial deployment. This framework can serve as a foundation for further studies in smart grid security, reliability, and performance benchmarking.