A study on group communication in distributed wide-area measurement system networks in large power systems

Future wide-area measurement and control applications in large electric power systems will require a new decentralized architecture that scales up with the rapidly growing deployment of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs). The emerging cloud computing paradigm that allows dynamic creation of virtual machines to form virtual data centers would help better support this new architecture through more efficient and flexible use of the networking and computing resources. However, this paradigm shift poses new technical challenges to the underneath communication and computing infrastructure leading to new problem formulations and solution approaches. Given that the primary communication pattern in the decentralized system will consist of various types of real-time group communication methods, in this paper we present a preliminary study on two problems, namely communication group formation and routing, that are fundamental to the envisioned new communication architecture.