The Impact of PMU Measurement Delays and a Heterogenous Communication Network on a Linear State Estimator

The common feature of many monitoring and control applications that will be accommodated in the future Wide Area Monitoring and Control system will be the quasi real time execution, exploiting the fast reporting rate of the Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU). A critical parameter for the timely execution and the good performance of such real time applications is the delay that the PMU measurements experience during their transfer between successive processing layers - for example, from the substation level to the control center. The associated delays, mainly due to the communication infrastructure, should be quantified and considered in the process of a real time application. Therefore, in this paper the delay associated to real PMU measurements that are transferred through a heterogeneous communication network (3G) is estimated for a specific measurement set-up used in the Romanian distribution system. Further, the respective delay will be considered in a numerical simulated measurement environment which is used by a real time state estimator to investigate its impact on the real time performance.