Communication Improvements for Intelligent Systems in Microgrids - Part II

The development of microgrids allows improving the electrical system from renewable energy sources. Costumers have started to install small-scale microgrids formed by wind turbines and photovoltaic panels, to guarantee their energy needs. This paper presents an evaluation of communication performance in small-scale microgrids and vehicle to grid (V2G), based on standard protocol IEC 61850. Three technologies were compared, Ethernet, WiFi and ZigBee according to the costs of implementation, reliability and end-to-end delay. To simulate the behavior of each technology in small-scale microgrids, the Riverbed Modeler software was used. The simulation uses three types of data to evaluate the performance of the network, such as periodic data stream, random data stream and burst data stream, accordingly to the control on intelligent applications. The specific study using these models allowed to reveal the behavior of each technology in front of different data streams and performance of the best technology, according to CPU utilization, data size and application protocol.