Performance analysis of frequency restoration for parallel voltage source inverters connected with a realistic communication channel

A topic of interest within the microgrid (MG) community is to achieve accurate sharing of active and reactive power among voltage source inverters (VSI) working in parallel while keeping the voltage frequency and amplitude stable, and close to a given reference. This problem has been mainly solved by the so-called frequency and voltage droop controllers that are local control loops implemented in each VSI. However, since they introduce a frequency and amplitude deviation, a secondary integral-like control loop using a communication system is usually deployed to enable each VSI to cancel the deviations. This paper evaluates two secondary control implementations of the frequency restoration with respect to properties of the communication system. Networked control applications are subject to known problems that are inherent to the use of a communication system such as message losses or varying sampling/transmission intervals, to name a few. The performance analysis reveals that control policies should be designed accounting also for the properties of the communication system. Otherwise, unexpected results violating the control specifications may appear.