Electric Vehicle adoption is increasing day by day, ease of charging electric vehicles is a very important aspect in the adoption of electric vehicles. There are different kinds of charging facilities for different kinds of vehicles. Chargers of electric vehicles facilitate communication with the centralized servers so that, charging process can be more managed and can be controlled through web and/or mobile applications.

There is an industry-standard protocol that enables the communication between physical charger and cloud application over the network/internet. This industry protocol is OCCP (Open Charge Point Control Protocol), all kind of standard charger supports OCPP. Using OCPP, Chargers send all charging session data to the cloud application, and on the other side, cloud application can relay commands to Chargers.

OCPP is an evolving protocol and having version 1.5, 1.6, and 2.0, currently, OCPP version 1.6 is more in use, some Chargers also support OCPP Version 2.0 along with OCPP 1.6

In the language of OCCP, a charging session called a transaction. The charger communicates to Central System(CMS) over OCPP protocol. When Charger needs to charge an EV, it sends a message to Central System. But before sending any message there should be connectivity between. and Charger and CMS, in OCPP Websokets protocol is used for this connectivity

Websockets are a bit different from HTTP , Websockets is the default protocol for OCPP communication and you can not use raw TCP or HTTP in place of that

We are going to write a series of blogs in the coming days over OCPP Version 1.6 and Version 2.0. OCPP is an open protocol and documentation is available on public websites