Disclosed herein are systems for hardware accelerated communications between devices for the protection of electric power delivery systems. For example, a merging unit may include input circuitry that receives a monitoring signal indicating an electrical characteristic of a power line. The merging unit may include pre-payload circuitry that generates at least portions of preset metadata of a communication frame. The merging unit may include payload generation circuitry that generates payload data of the communication frame based at least in part on the electrical characteristic. The merging unit may include a communication interface that sends the communication frame to a receiving device.