Shorter Wait is Crucial: Adaptive Transmission for Preserving Data Availability in Smart Grids

The development of smart grids has drawn increased interest from power utilities to support the stable operation of power grids. A key component, the wide-area measurement system (WAMS), integrates phasor data concentrators (PDCs) and phasor measurement units (PMUs) to collect the necessary electrical information for power grid monitoring, control, and protection. However, transmission delays and losses challenge the availability of measurement data in WAMS, especially as data travels through legacy communication networks. To address these issues, we investigate the time alignment mechanism PDCs use to synchronize data from multiple PMUs, identifying latency caused by the waiting time for delayed or failed PMUs. We propose an adaptive configuration mechanism for measurement data transmission that dynamically adjusts PDC wait time and PDC-PMU pairing to mitigate unnecessary latency without compromising data availability. The experiment results show that the proposed method outperforms the benchmarks regarding the latency of measurement data by up to 76 % improvement.