Network level Quality of Service (QoS) challenges for smart grid measurement and control systems

This paper focuses on the firm real-time requirements of Time-Critical Wide Area Measurement and Control systems, that are expected to play a major role in future Smart Grids. It analyses the operation of these systems and identifies their communication traffic characteristics. It shows that these characteristics are significantly different to those of the current near real-time Wide Area Measurement applications that provide visualization to support manual grid control. It then discusses the performance evaluation of these time critical systems and presents the second stage in an ongoing body of work aimed at developing models and techniques to carry out the performance evaluation process. It presents some preliminary results and outlines the direction for future work.

I. Introduction

Smart grid communication systems will be required to support a wide range of applications, some of which will have similar requirements to those of current Internet applications, and others that may fall into the remit of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, certain classes of smart grid applications, in particular, those intended to support automatic wide area control in the smart grids of the near future, have expectations that are significantly different from those of most existing wide area applications. This is due to their need for firm realtime delay bounds that have quite stringent delay targets. Furthermore, these delay bound apply to the combined delay resulting from both application level processing time and communication latency. The most time-critical of these applications require end-to end delay targets of 10ms or less. Although no separate targets has been set for the communication delay, it has been suggested that 1ms to 2ms would be an appropriate goal for the delay component of the communication network [1] [2].