  Internet-of-Things (IoTs) envisions to integrate, coordinate, communicate,
and collaborate real-world objects in order to perform daily tasks in a more
intelligent and efficient manner. To comprehend this vision, this paper studies
the design of a large scale IoT system for smart grid application, which
constitutes a large number of home users and has the requirement of fast
response time. In particular, we focus on the messaging protocol of a universal
IoT home gateway, where our cloud enabled system consists of a backend server,
unified home gateway (UHG) at the end users, and user interface for mobile
devices. We discuss the features of such IoT system to support a large scale
deployment with a UHG and real-time residential smart grid applications. Based
on the requirements, we design an IoT system using the XMPP protocol, and
implemented in a testbed for energy management applications. To show the
effectiveness of the designed testbed, we present some results using the
proposed IoT architecture.
