The developments in communication technologies paved way for the materialization of the envisioned smart grid (SG). The SG is the next generation power grid with enhanced capabilities for monitoring and control. Especially, the development of high-speed digital processing devices known as the phasor measurement units (PMUs) has increased the monitoring capabilities of the grid. The measurements acquired by the PMUs which are known as the synchrophasor are communicated to a central monitoring station for processing and control. The communication networks based on synchrophasor applications, referred to as synchrophasor communication networks (SCN) can also be used for providing connectivity between the control station and the PMUs and thus, this paper discusses different communication architectures for the synchrophasor applications from the perspective of their reliability and cost. The unique contribution of the work is that it considers both the hardware failures as well as the packet delivery ratio (PDR) for estimating the reliability indices for these networks. Three scenarios based on dedicated, shared and hybrid SCNs have been proposed for a practical power grid with the PMUs located at the optimal locations. These networks were simulated using the QualNet network simulator and their performance is analyzed in terms of reliability, end-to-end delay (ETD) and cost.

Keywords: Synchrophasor communication networks, Smart grid, Wide area monitoring system, Reliability