Simulation study of QoS guaranteed ATM transmission for future power system communication

The asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) will support communication services with both constant and variable bit rate, for example, data, voice, video transmissions and, of particular note, multimedia applications combining those service components. However, many problems are required to be solved in order to apply this technique to an electric power company´s network. Electric power companies are required to transmit very important information, such as information regarding electric power control. The transmission of this important information is required to have very high quality. Therefore, if the important information and the general information were switched in the same manner, the stringent QoS (quality of service) required for the important information could not be guaranteed. The authors examine the QoS of future utility communications which include ATM-native teleprotection signals, inter-LAN data communications and video conference communications. First, they propose a more accurate model which can be expressed by a multi-state Markovian process for computer data communication traffic. Second, the implementation of a priority control scheme in an ATM switch is proposed to guarantee the QoS of important power system communications. Finally, computer simulations are used to clarify the effectiveness of priority control and the feasibility of future ATM-based utility telecommunication networks