Software Defined Networks based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

The current power grid is no longer a feasible solution due to ever-increasing user demand of electricity, old infrastructure, and reliability issues and thus require transformation to a better grid a.k.a., smart grid (SG). The key features that distinguish SG from the conventional electrical power grid are its capability to perform two-way communication, demand side management, and real time pricing. Despite all these advantages that SG will bring, there are certain issues which are specific to SG communication system. For instance, network management of current SG systems is complex, time consuming, and done manually. Moreover, SG communication (SGC) system is built on different vendor specific devices and protocols. Therefore, the current SG systems are not protocol independent, thus leading to interoperability issue. Software defined network (SDN) has been proposed to monitor and manage the communication networks globally. This article serves as a comprehensive survey on SDN-based SGC. In this article, we first discuss taxonomy of advantages of SDNbased SGC.We then discuss SDN-based SGC architectures, along with case studies. Our article provides an in-depth discussion on routing schemes for SDN-based SGC. We also provide detailed survey of security and privacy schemes applied to SDN-based SGC. We furthermore present challenges, open issues, and future research directions related to SDN-based SGC.Comment: Accepte

Generalized optimal placement of PMUs considering power system observability, communication infrastructure, and quality of service requirements

This paper presents a generalized optimal placement of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) considering power system observability, reliability, Communication Infrastructure (CI), and latency time associated with this CI. Moreover, the economic study for additional new data transmission paths is considered as well as the availability of predefined locations of some PMUs and the preexisting communication devices (CDs) in some buses. Two cases for the location of the Control Center Base Station (CCBS) are considered; predefined case and free selected case. The PMUs placement and their required communication network topology and channel capacity are co-optimized simultaneously. In this study, two different approaches are applied to optimize the objective function; the first approach is combined from Binary Particle Swarm Optimization-Gravitational Search Algorithm (BPSOGSA) and the Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) algorithm, while the second approach is based only on BPSOGSA. The feasibility of the proposed approaches are examined by applying it to IEEE 14-bus and IEEE 118-bus systems

Application of Advanced Early Warning Systems with Adaptive Protection

This project developed and field-tested two methods of Adaptive Protection systems utilizing synchrophasor data. One method detects conditions of system stress that can lead to unintended relay operation, and initiates a supervisory signal to modify relay response in real time to avoid false trips. The second method detects the possibility of false trips of impedance relays as stable system swings “encroach” on the relays’ impedance zones, and produces an early warning so that relay engineers can re-evaluate relay settings. In addition, real-time synchrophasor data produced by this project was used to develop advanced visualization techniques for display of synchrophasor data to utility operators and engineers