Implementing Wireless Monitoring for Substations on the Field Programmable Logic Arrays (FPGA)

Monitoring remote electrical substations distributed all over the country can incur capital cost that generally difficult to justify. Fortunately, current cellular telephone technology can reduce the capital outlay required to monitor such substations. Further cost reduction can be achieved with the adoption of a low cost field programmable logic array (FPGA) technology. FPGA can be employed as a computing engine to provide supervisory control and other functionalities to these remote substation installations. An integrated substation supervisory control system can consist of remote nodes that made-up of FPGA based hardware and autonomous server computers located in the regional offices. These remote nodes can exchange messages with the servers over a cellular network, thus avoiding the capital cost needed for building a new communication infra-structure. The server can be elected as a call centre to dispatch short messages automatically to the maintenance crews in response to requests received from the remote nodes in the case of electrical equipment breakdowns.