Monitoring Traffic Optimization in a Smart Grid

Guillaume Habault, Maxime Lefrançois, François Lemercier, Nicolas Montavont, Periklis Chatzimisios, Georgios Z. Papadopoulos

Abstract: The emergence of microgeneration systems steadily increases, and it raises concerns regarding their impact on the power grid. It is, therefore, crucial to efficiently integrate them into future smart grid architectures, as there is not any standard way to monitor production units. Moreover, current data collection systems are simple and do not consider their impact on local area networks. This paper presents a set of proposed mechanisms that reduces the monitoring traffic, while offering management flexibility on large-scale systems. This study is illustrated with measurements performed on a small grid, and it shows that, for monitoring a photovoltaic production, both 1-min and 1-s intervals provide the same production estimation, while significantly decreasing the associated traffic. It can be reduced even more by aggregating several measurements during a given period before sending them and by using specific mechanisms to ensure reliability. This experiment also helps authors identify best practices for monitoring different equipment based on their behaviors.