An Empirical Study of Synchrophasor Communication Delay in a Utility TCP/IP Network

Although there is a plethora of literature dealing with Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) communication delay, there has not been any effort to generalize empirical delay results by identifying the distributions with the best fit. The existing studies typically assume a distribution, or simply build on analogies to communication network routing delay. Specifically, this study provides insight into the characterization of the communication delay of both unprocessed PMU data and synchrophasors sorted by a Phasor Data Concentrator (PDC). The results suggest that a bi-modal distribution containing two normal distributions offers the best fit of the delay of the unprocessed data, whereas the delay profile of the sorted synchrophasors resembles a normal. Based on these results, the possibility of evaluating the reliability of a synchrophasor application with respect to a particular choice of PDC timeout is discussed.QC 20131015