Wireless Infrastructure M2M Network For Distributed Power Grid Monitoring

With the massive integration of distributed RESs into the power system, the demand for timely and reliable network quality monitoring, control, and fault analysis is rapidly growing. Following the successful deployment of PMUs in transmission systems for power monitoring, a new opportunity to utilize PMU measurement data for power quality assessment in distribution grid systems is emerging. The main problem, however, is that a distribution grid system does not normally have the support of an infrastructure network. Therefore, the main objective in this article is to develop an M2M communication network that can support wide ranging sensory data, including high rate synchrophasor data for real-time communication. In particular, we evaluate the suitability of the emerging IEEE 802.11ah standard by exploiting its important features, such as classifying the power grid sensory data into different categories according to their traffic characteristics. For performance evaluation we use our hardware in the loop grid communication network.