An important aspect of enabling Smart Grid and other similar technologies is the development of communication networks that efficiently gather information from remote locations and reliably deliver the data to a world of connected devices. In this context, the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged and led to the development of several lightweight communications protocols optimized for various environments. This study will focus on the Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol as used in a remote sensor network setting with the goal of characterizing delay patterns to improve reliability of large scale sensor networks in a publish/subscribe communication environment. Revealing the connection between data size, data collection intervals, network traffic, and delay, an approach for modeling an MQTT network design based on experimentation and inspection of behavior at the packet level is presented, and statistical distributions are explored to develop a method for real-time analysis.