PINCS: A Power System Integrated Cyber Network Simulator for WAMS

Modern electricity grid is a combination of traditional power system and a wide area cyber network from power generation to distribution end. Wide area measurement systems (WAMS) is one of the technologies used in the smart grid, responsible to provide a GPS enabled phasor measurements of geographically distributed substations in the grid with a high speed of 25/50 data frames per second. Thus, the performance of a WAMS based real time monitoring and control analytics is mainly determined by the communication backbone of the WAMS. In this study we introduce a simple, scalable, modular and extensible simulation framework for WAMS which is a seamless integration of cyber network and power system simulators. It is implemented using mininet a network simulator, iPDC a PMU-PDC simulator and EMTP(ATP) a power system transient simulation program. Further in this paper we present a case study modeled using this simulator to assess the Quality of Service (QoS) of the WAMS network. The case study reports the communication delay distribution for PMU-PDC, impacts of multimedia traffic on PMU data transmission rate, comparison of communication delays associated with TCP and UDP protocols. Thus this simulator can be a platform to test different analytics for their QoS requirements before their real field deployment.