IoT Monitoring Framework with Physics-Based Energy Loss Modeling for Smart Microgrids: Architecture and Benchmarks
Smart microgrids combining photovoltaic arrays, wind turbines, and battery storage generate telemetry that existing open-source monitoring tools cannot process with per-mechanism energy loss visibility in real time. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of an IoT monitoring framework. The framework incorporates a physics-based microgrid simulator, a hierarchical MQTT communication architecture, and a React-based web-based user interface that supports WebSocket-based real-time data visualization. The framework consists of ten containerized microservices that can be started with a single command: docker compose up -d. All stack performance testing was conducted using a simulated 1 h test case based on a 100 kWp PV system, 10 kW wind turbine, and 50 kWh battery-powered campus microgrid. Median P50 publisher-to-subscriber latency was 27.2 ms and 99th percentile (P99) latency was 48.3 ms, with 100% message delivery across 5840 test messages, with per-topic analysis revealing a 25 ms serialization-order effect in sequential MQTT publishing. Comparative analysis against nine existing platforms including OpenEMS, VOLTTRON, Eclipse Ditto, and pymgrid confirms that, among the platforms surveyed, none unifies physics-based loss telemetry, IoT communication, time-series storage, and real-time visualization in a single reproducible deployment.