Control coordination in inverter-based microgrids using AoI-based 5G schedulers

A coordinated set point automatic adjustment with correction enabled (C-SPAACE) framework that uses 5G communication for real-time control coordination between inverter-based resources (IBR) in microgrids is proposed. Utilising slicing capability, 5G offers low-latency communication to C-SPAACE under normal conditions. However, given the multitude of power grid use cases, a certain 5G slice for C-SPAACE may have access only to limited radio spectrum resources, which if not managed well, greatly undermines the communication needs of C-SPAACE framework. Thus, optimally scheduling the available spectrum resources among IBRs in a sliced 5G network-based C-SPAACE framework becomes a critical problem. To address this issue, the authors utilise a novel age of information (AoI) metric and designs an AoI-based 5G scheduler to provide low-latency communication to C-SPAACE. Following this, a co-simulation environment is designed using PSCAD/EMTDC and Python to simulate a microgrid supported by 5G communication. Time-domain simulation case studies are performed using the proposed co-simulation environment to evaluate the performance of C-SPAACE using 5G with both AoI-based and other baseline (non-AoI) schedulers.