Communication network modeling and simulation for Wide Area Measurement applications

In the recent years, Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) based Wide Area Measurement System (WAMS) has been receiving ever increasing attention from the academia as well as from the industry. Power utilities have been designing and implementing WAMS to provide more intelligent monitoring, control, and protection of the power grid. In order to achieve real-time operations in the modern power systems, construction of an economic and efficient communication infrastructure is a necessity, and various utilities have been laying fiber optical network along their transmission and distribution right of way to leverage the abilities of PMUs in providing greater visibility over a larger area of the grid - thereby providing opportunities for better control and stability. The choice of network architecture, protocols, and various measures for quality of service guarantees must be made by the network architects at the utilities. In this paper, we present a methodology based on profiling data traffic for various WAMS applications according to their communication requirements, and then creating simulation models and scenarios to obtain various parameters for specific architectural and protocol choices. Our simulation results are encouraging in the sense that under modest choices all the applications meet the timing and bandwidth requirements. However, the main contribution of this work is the methodology that would allow the utilities to evaluate various communication infrastructure choices while deploying WAMS.