Comparison of publish-subscribe network architectures for Smart Grid wide area monitoring

The future of the electrical power grid is the “Smart Grid” that uses a combination of digital sensing and actuation technologies. For example, Phasor Measurement Units (PMU) can be used to accurately measure the quality of power and help improve the reliability and efficiency of the grid. A specially designed network architecture is required to transport the PMU data to the data processing systems. The NASPInet framework specifies requirements (such as latency and reliability) to be met for different types of applications that will process the PMU data. The objective of this paper is to analyze suitable network architectures that can meet all the requirements of NASPInet and thus be useful for the Smart Grid. An architecture based on the publish-subscribe paradigm and a distributed hash table technique for storing meta-data about the publishers is presented. This architecture is compared to GridStat, PSIRP and Source Specific Multicast approaches, using discrete event simulation models based on OMNET++. The delay performance of these systems has been studied for different network parameters.