A new data compression algorithm for power quality online monitoring

The increasing application of power quality data acquisition devices produces large amount of data that should be compressed. The paper investigates the characteristics of power quality data and delta modulation technique, and it proposes a lossless power data compression algorithm based on high-order delta modulation. The compression algorithm carries on multiple differential operations on power quality data, so it could reduce the magnitude of data and requires fewer bits for coding. The proposed algorithm has high compression ratio and little computation requirements. Furthermore, it is suitable for dealing with the power quality data measured at high sampling frequency, and it can work well with traditional compression methods such as Huffman coding. Simulations for several kinds of power quality data confirm its effectiveness and advantages over traditional Huffman coding method.