Better late than never: Efficient transmission of wide area measurements in smart grids

Abstract

The persistent pursuit of reliability dates back to the birth of power system. In the era of smart grid, the harsh requirement extends to the whole system including communication infrastructure. The concentration of wide area synchronized measurements within large system is challenging. In this paper, we investigate the data aggregation issue of phasor measurement units (PMU) data stream in the synchrophasor network, where large latencies lead to unnecessary packet loss. We reduce the final packet loss rate by formulating the data aggregation problem as a multiple stopping time problem. Based on simulation, the success rate booms when compared with single optimal stopping time and multiple fixed-stopping time approaches. Our result could benefit the future development of protocol design, system state estimation and missing data recovery techniques.