Time Synchronization of Pulse-Coupled Oscillators for Smart Grids

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks has been widely recognized as a promising technology in smart grids. The sensors are installed on the critical power grid equipments to acquire the essential grid datas such as voltage, current and system frequency. And the data acquisition in smart grids is particularly time sensitive: the accurate timestamp of information is required from the sensors so that the absolute time of acquisition can be determined. Due to the crystal manufacturing tolerance and working conditions, the clocks of sensor nodes oscillators are non-identical and drifting. Thus, the key enabling technology time synchronization, aiming to provide a common sense of timing, is required in distributed smart grids sensor networks. Inspired by Peskin's model for self-synchronization of cardiac pacemaker, the pulse-coupled oscillators is implemented to the wireless sensor nodes to ensure the wireless networks of smart grids be able to achieve a common timescale, it is also suitable for distributed deployment in large-scale smart grids. In addition, the intensive simulations of three kinds of single-hop wireless sensor networks have been carried out to evaluate the performance of linear pulse-coupled non-identical oscillators.