Increased use of electric appliances and devices has led to amplified energy consumption and
demand that has added more stress on the existing grid. To be able to manage adequately and
efficiently the increased demand, the electric power utilities have been obliged to upgrade their
grids using smart grid technologies. Indeed, the implementation of advanced communication
with smart metering infrastructure has helped the utility to better control the grid and manage
critical peak loading through demand-side response mechanisms. Besides, the development of
IoT technologies have encouraged the adoption of smart devices and appliances to enable the
smooth and easy transition to the smart grid. This project aims at designing a device-to-device
negotiation mechanism for energy management enabling demand response at the consumption
sites. The proposed approach is to create a local communication network among the connected
smart devices and the main smart meter in a building. The ESP32 IoT development kit was
selected to mimic the smart devices because of its low cost and high performance. WIFI
technology was adopted for communication because nowadays most of the buildings are
equipped with such technology. To assure that all devices can communicate with each other
and the smart meter, which could be located far from some of the devices, a mesh network is
developed. The mesh network allows any smart device to communicate with any other smart
device even if they are out of their Wi-Fi communication range. Therefore, the mesh network
provides more reliability to the proposed negotiation system. The device-to-device negotiation
algorithm is developed such as each device receives information from the smart meter about
the amount of demand reduction and sends back information about its readiness to respond to
such demand reduction. The device-to-device energy negotiation algorithm is designed to
reduce the number or/and energy consumption of appliances operating during peak demand
time. The negotiation algorithm and decision-making among smart appliances depends on
the device operation priority, power demand, and availability. The proposed algorithm design
is very important in terms of its ability to reach fast decisions during an energy negotiation
operation among the connected smart devices and the smart meter. Besides, an important
parameter to consider is the security of the proposed system design. The security is assured by
adding security tasks such as ID and password during each communication process to secure
the system from the cyber-attacks. The proposed design was implemented and tested on a set
of five ESP32 kits. The ESP32 devices were placed and tested at different locations and
Department of Electrical Engineering Senior Design Project Report iii
distances. One of the five ESP32 devices was acting as the coordinator and the four others as
smart appliances. The obtained results obtained validated the efficacy of the proposed design
at a small scale. Unfortunately, it was not possible to conduct the test on a larger of devices
because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the mandatory home confinement, which did not
allow us to go to the University to acquire more devices and conduct the experiments in the
laboratories.