Communication network performance study of a high-tech park power quality monitoring system

Facing with increasingly sophisticated customers and more stringent demands on the quality of power that they supply, several utilities have installed power quality (PQ) monitoring systems to monitor the quality of the power they deliver to customers. For a PQ monitoring system that covers a great area, one of the main concerned in the design of the communication network for the system is the effect of conflicts and contention between devices on total system operation. Contention causes work to be queued or blocked from execution and system performance may suffer as a result. In this paper, a discrete event simulation technique is used to study the performance of two communication schemes for a high-tech park PQ monitoring system, one with dedicated phone lines and the other one with the corporate intranet or over large distance via the Internet. Through simulations the interactions between all devices in the system and the cause of conflict and contention can be identified. Based on the simulation results, system designers could adopt available options to increase bandwidth utilization or transmit to different bandwidth to maintain an adequate communication performance.