Real-Scenario Testing of an Active Phasor Data Concentrator

The privileged position of the Phasor Data Concentrator (PDC) in a synchrophasor-based monitoring system can be exploited to make this device the core of a distributed measurement architecture suitable for control and protection applications in power systems. Recent research work has introduced the concept of an active PDC able both to handle adaptively the latency of the input streams sent by the Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) and to implement control logics based on the measurement values provided by the same PMUs. This paper presents and discusses experimental tests performed on a prototype of the active PDC, which manages, through the implemented advanced functionalities, a realistic number of PMUs located in two different geographical sites. First, we evaluate the PDC processing time as function of the input streams' number. Then, we investigate the feasibility and advantage of an optimised management of the PDC output streams in the presence of several PMUs characterised by different geographical location and data packet size.