Examination of data delay and packet loss for wide-area monitoring and control systems

Timely and synchronized phasor data at high resolutions holds a great promise for more responsible and advanced power grid operations. It is expected that the combined effort of developing new application paradigms and the supporting Information and Communication Technology (ICT) will enable the evolutionary change for future transmission grid operation. This paper addresses the design of the supporting ICT system for Wide-Area Monitoring and Control applications considering system performance. The major contribution that distinguishes this paper from previous research efforts in the same area is that this study quantifies the end-to-end data delay and the received packet rate with considerations of different levels of data concentrations. The analysis performed in this paper is not merely limited to the performance issues caused by communication networks but also provides means to view and analyze the overall data delay of the entire supporting ICT system.