Comparative Study of Various Communication Technologies for Secondary Controllers in DC Microgrid

With the increased emphasis on power generation from renewable sources, microgrids are considered as the best solution for distributed generation. Control of distributed sources in dc microgrid have been a topic of interest for both academia and industry. Reliable operation of secondary controller of a dc microgrid depends on a good communication network. However, the literature on dc microgrid does not give the methodology to select a particular communication technology from a wide variety of wired and wireless technologies. The selection of proper technology is based on many factors like the size of the microgrid, bandwidth, number of power electronic converters supported, latency, range, etc. A comparison of wired and wireless communication technologies based on these factors, and their suitability to use in dc microgrid is performed in this paper. Expressions are derived to calculate the maximum permissible number of devices supported and the network latency for each communication technology. The observations made in this paper are validated with case studies on low and medium power dc microgrids.