Design and performance evaluation of hierarchical communication network for wide area measurement system

Abstract

Over the years, renewable energy has experienced great growth and attention. The renewable power plants are distributed over large geographical areas and the number of renewable power plants is exponentially increasing. These distributed energy sources may make power system complex and unstable. Further, monitoring and control by existing system such as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system is facing the limitation to capture power system dynamics. In order to combat these problems, phasor measurement units (PMUs) are installed at power plants and substations to implement wide area measurement system (WAMS). To get accurate, high sampling frequency and synchronized data from PMUs at distributed locations, the WAMS needs high speed and reliable communication network. The communication network plays an important role in WAMS because real-time synchrophasor data and control messages are transmitted through communication network. In this paper, we present a hierarchical communication network architecture for WAMS. The proposed communication network consists of three network levels: generation, substation, and control center. To evaluate the performance of the proposed network, communication network for WAMS is modeled and simulated through OPNET. The simulation results are validated by comparing with the results of numerical analysis. The network performance is evaluated in terms of network delay under various link bandwidth and background traffic.