Experimental setup of wide area monitoring using Zigbee IEEE 802.15.4 technology and RF FM technique

It is important for a modern power grid to be smarter in order to provide reliable and sustainable supply of electricity. Traditional way of receiving data from the wired system is a very old and outdated technology. For a quicker and better response from the electric system, it is important to look at wireless systems as a feasible option. In this paper, wireless network based architecture has been adopted for monitoring and optimizing the electric grid. In the proposed system, we have considered the operation station as a smart sensor node and a number of wireless transmitters and receivers have been used in the network. Crossbow wireless network kit with Zigbee technology has been used in our system for wireless data transmission. The system was also tested with RF transmitters and receivers for better understanding of the problem associated with Zigbee and also finding potential ways to solve that problem faced during the lab experiment. LABVIEW software has been used to control and monitor the received data. For using the proposed system for Distributed Generation (DG), a MATLAB based program is proposed.