Timeliness-Driven Integrated Sensing, Transmission, Computing, and Control for Power-Communication Coupling Smart Grid

The rapid advancement of 6G, cloud-fog computing, and internet of things (IoT) has revolutionized the control paradigm of smart grid. With the closed coupling between communication and power domains, control performance heavily relies on timely and secure sensing, transmission, and computing of grid state information. Conventional approaches which treat the four sectors as separate subsystems suffer from slow convergence and even cascading control oscillations. In this paper, we address the key research problem of sensing-transmission-computing-control integrated optimization to minimize the overall voltage deviation. A timeliness-driven integrated optimization algorithm is proposed, where proactive optimization of communication resource adaptation and power-domain control decisions is conducted based on the evolution of information timeliness loss in sensing, transmission, and computing, as well as its impact on control accuracy. Particularly, a self-penalty based cost function is developed to quantify the mismatch between communication-domain resource allocation and voltage control deviation. Moreover, a novel timeliness indicator, named age of trustworthy information (AoTI), is introduced to capture timeliness-trustworthiness performance loss on proportional-integral (PI) consensus control stability margin. Consensus weights are optimized based on AoTI to further enhance convergence speed and improve control accuracy. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly improves power-domain control stability, validating the efficiency of AoTI as a critical indicator for control information importance.