Communication network modeling and simulation for Wide Area Measurement applications

Abstract

In the recent years, Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) based Wide Area Measurement System (WAMS) has been receiving ever increasing attention from the academia as well as from the industry. Power utilities have been designing and implementing WAMS to provide more intelligent monitoring, control, and protection of the power grid. In order to achieve real-time operations in the modern power systems, construction of an economic and efficient communication infrastructure is a necessity, and various utilities have been laying fiber optical network along their transmission and distribution right of way to leverage the abilities of PMUs in providing greater visibility over a larger area of the grid -thereby providing opportunities for better control and stability. The choice of network architecture, protocols, and various measures for quality of service guarantees must be made by the network architects at the utilities. In this paper, we present a methodology based on profiling data traffic for various WAMS applications according to their communication requirements, and then creating simulation models and scenarios to obtain various parameters for specific architectural and protocol choices. Our simulation results are encouraging in the sense that under modest choices all the applications meet the timing and bandwidth requirements. However, the main contribution of this work is the methodology that would allow the utilities to evaluate various communication infrastructure choices while deploying WAMS.

A flexible platform for synchronized measurements, data aggregation and information retrieval

“…There have been many theoretical studies performed on WAMS latencies, like [29][30][31][32][33][34], but they all refer to numerical simulation results, with no information on latencies in an actual deployed system. Therefore, the former theoretical values could only be used as a rough term of comparison for our results.…”

An Innovative Measurement Approach for Load Flow Analysis in MV Smart Grids

“…The loads control can also improve the power flow management. All these functionalities can be achieved only with a suitable communication system, with proper reliability and real-time features [7]- [9]. Traditionally, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems are used to ensure proper networks operation, by means of continuous electrical quantities monitoring and distributed actuators managing.…”

“…A fundamental role of the monitoring system is load flow analysis, which evaluates a lot of network electrical data, such as node voltages and power flows on the distribution feeders. To perform load flow analysis in medium voltage (MV) distribution networks, two types of measurement instruments can be used: 1) phasor measurement units (PMU) [9]; and 2) power quality analyzers (PQAs). These devices are generally connected to the MV network by means of proper voltage and current transducers.…”

Performance evaluation of MPLS-enabled communications infrastructure for wide area monitoring systems

“…Early communication media, such as power line carrier and microwave, had constraints with regard to channel capacity, data transfer rate, reliability, scalability, robustness and so on. As a consequence of the emergence of optical fibre, these constraints have been improved significantly and it has now become the most suitable candidate for WAMS applications [2]. Furthermore, early communication networks carried continuous bit streams over physical links using a technique called circuit switching.…”