A Communication Protocol for Online Monitoring of Power Quality in Distribution System

Abstract

The wireless sensor network (WSN) can be used in many applications, especially electrical distribution systems (EDS). The power transmitted on the distribution line has a huge impact by environmental changes like temperature, humidity etc., leading to problems like voltage sag, voltage swell, and changes in the power frequency. These effects affect the devices that are driven by power, for large scale industries, the impact is so heavy. To monitor the imbalance in the transmitting power, the sensor nodes are used to monitor the PQ issues. Then the monitored information needs to be transmitted to the monitoring centre; in this flow, communication plays an important role in minimising the cost of the WSN. For monitoring the PQ, first, the sensor nodes are deployed in the appropriate area. Deploying the sensor node anywhere on the sensor node is impossible. Therefore, the node in this article is used on the feed circuit, which is mounted on the insulator for protection from the power supply. Then the bald eagle search (BES) optimisation based ZigBee communication protocol (ZBES) is designed to transmit the retrieved data from the sensor node to the monitoring station. The designed protocol will make the cost efficient and energy saving path to transmit data to the edge node. The performance of the proposed routing protocol is compared with the ZigBee and other routing protocols.