Impact of wireless communication delay on load sharing among distributed generation systems through smart microgrids

Load sharing among distributed generation systems (DGS) is one of the most important topics in wireless-enabled smart microgrids, where a set of power inverters at different geographical locations work coordinately and collaboratively through wireless networks to meet the load requirement. Parallel power inverters operated in distributed generation systems rely on the underlying wireless communication channels to exchange power information among them for load sharing control. However, existing work in the area of load sharing has largely ignored the effect of wireless communication delay. Study has shown that the time-varying wireless communication delay may have a significant impact on the performance of power inverters. In this work, we aim to fill this gap and study the performance of distributed power inverters under the scenario of wireless-enabled smart microgrids. We first study the power inverter performance by taking into account the time-varying wireless communication delay. Then, we propose an optimal controller to overcome the delay problem and to provide a smooth load sharing performance. Both theoretical and simulation results show the effectiveness and responsiveness of the proposed controller design.