Cooperative Sensor Networks for Voltage Quality Monitoring in Smart Grids

The paper intends to give a contribution toward the definition of a fully decentralized voltage quality monitoring architecture by proposing the employment of self organizing sensor networks. According to this paradigm each node can assess both the performances of the monitored site, computed by acquiring local information, and the global performances of the monitored grid section, computed by local exchanges of information with its neighbors nodes. Thanks to this feature each node could automatically detect local voltage quality anomalies. Moreover system operator can assess the system voltage quality index for each grid section by inquiring any node of the corresponding sensors network without the need of a central fusion center acquiring and processing all the node acquisitions. This makes the overall monitoring architecture highly scalable, self-organizing and distributed.