An adaptive packets hopping mechanism for transmission line monitoring systems with a long chain topology

Abstract To achieve the goals of efficient and safe operation of smart grids, a remote monitoring system for extra-high voltage (EHV) transmission line is required. In Taiwan, most of the towers of EHV transmission systems built by Taiwan Power Company (TPC) are located in remote areas and their line topology resembles a long chain. Therefore, the monitoring network designed for the EHV transmission lines cannot easily gain access to energy sources to power its communication nodes and may become fragmented due to any node failure. In view of the challenge, this study proposes a customized routing scheme for EHV transmission line monitoring, named transmission coverage adjustable multi-hop algorithm (TCAMA). TCAMA not only controls transmission power but also performs route selection to minimize power consumption. This algorithm also creates multiple redundant paths to meet the communication performance requirements. To verify the effectiveness of TCAMA, an Internet of Things-based monitoring system has adopted the proposed TCAMA to monitor an actual TPC EHV transmission system to examine its communication network performance. First, a gateway was developed, and a point-to-point transmission experiment was conducted to evaluate the transmission performance of the gateway with different transmission power and distances. Second, the results of the point-to-point experiment served as the transmission parameters in the network simulation, and 150 simulations were conducted. Then, the simulation results were analyzed to determine whether the data packet transmission performance met the communication requirements of a smart grid. Third, the performance of TCAMA was further examined using the distribution and topology of critical EHV transmission lines in Taiwan. Based on the field test results, TCAMA can prevent packet storms and can perform customized tasks using empirical measurements. In addition, TCAMA is capable of achieving 100% packet delivery while maintaining end-to-end communication delay much less than 2000 ms. The delay and energy consumption during the network transmission can also be reduced when TCAMA is employed.