Challenges of Power Line Communications for Advanced Distribution Automation in Smart Grid

Advanced Distribution Automation (ADA) is one of the key applications of the Smart Grid. Since Power Line Communications (PLC) can offer a cost-effective communication infrastructure supporting data acquisition and automation and IEC 61850 can provide interoperability of all power grid monitoring and control devices, they have appeared to be promising for ADA. However, the applicability of PLC for ADA needs to be investigated carefully since this technology still exhibits some limitations related to data rate, reliability, etc., in ADA scenario. When estimating the bandwidth requirement for ADA applications, previous works tend to make over-simplified assumptions on the numbers of involved communications devices as well as the sizes and the exchange rates of messages generated by those devices. This paper therefore attempts to give a more reasonable bandwidth estimation by incorporating insightful understandings of data modeling and communication services standardized by IEC 61850 together with knowledge on practical power grid infrastructure. The estimation is then used to identify the potential challenges for PLC to support ADA applications.