Information and communication technologies (ICTs), adopted by the Smart Grid (SG), have been used to improve the control of the power system beyond that implemented in the conventional grid. Todays the objectives are, among others, to enable efficient integration of the renewable energy resources (RES), to maintain security of energy supply and to encourage the future energy market. As a result, the implementation of such a system requires the exchange of data between legacy and new smart grid applications. To make this possible, a versatile communication platform is required, so the main question that is answered in this thesis is: what would such a platform be?The objective of this work is to design, implement and evaluate a low-cost, ope...