Wireless Networked -Based Sensing for Protection and Decentralized Control of Critical Infrastructures

We develop analytical tools to assess the use of wireless data communication in power system environments. The communication functions considered in the study include real time monitoring, protective relaying and control. Two notions of wireless capacity computation in joint additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and impulsive noise channel is presented. We determine the transmit power require to maintain enough wireless channel capacity for reliable data transmission in power system environment. A combined networking and information theoretic approach to address the noise, and bursty source issues was adopted. Instead of posing the transmit power determination problem as a classical optimization problem, a mobile agent based approach to monitor both the queue state and the channel condition, as well as match user´s rate demand to the time varying power system wireless channel capacity was proposed. Our results show that under diverse delay constraints, reasonable transmit-power levels to maintain wireless channel capacity for reliable data transmission in power system environment is possible.