CIRED 20th International Conference on Electricity Distribution
Paper 0296
WIRELESS NETWORK MANAGEMENT
OPTIMIZED FOR EMI MEASUREMENT IN POWER SUBSTATIONS
W.H. SIEW K.Y. LIU
Uni. of Strathclyde – UK Uni. of Strathclyde – UK
w.siew@eee.strath.ac.uk karlliu@eee.strath.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
This paper presents the development of a wireless sensor
network management protocol optimized for transient
electromagnetic field measurement in power substations,
which is of good time resolution and permits flexible
interactivities and simultaneous measurement between
sensor nodes.
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Fig.1: Example of switching operation in power substations [1]
In power substations, electric and magnetic emissions are
generated during switching operations, such as circuit
breakers during network reconfiguration and network
fault. In particular, switching operations of primary plant
components such as disconnect switches and circuit
breakers generate significant transient electromagnetic
fields (Fig.1).
These unwanted emissions constitute potential
electromagnetic interference (EMI) to sensitive electronic
equipments within the substations. They may couple into
the control circuits and electronic equipments and
constitute a serious threat to their normal function.
Therefore electronic equipments in substations must be
suitably designed and protected to survive in the harsh
EM environment. In fact some standards have been
issued to deal with this situation, such as IEEE 1613 -
IEEE Standard Environmental and Testing Requirements
for Communications Networking Devices in Electric
Power Substations and IEC 61850-3 Communications
Systems and Networks in Substations (Section 5.7).
CIRED2009 Session 2 Paper No 0296
Prague, 8-11 June 2009
R.W. STEWART Q. LI
Uni. of Strathclyde – UK Shandong University-CHINA
r.stewart@eee.strath.ac.uk lqmeee@sdu.edu.cn
To evaluate the substation environment’s compliance with
EMC standards and to monitor possible faults, an
electromagnetic interference measuring or monitoring
sensor-network could be deployed in substations. Such a
sensor network would be designed as an intelligent and
interactive multi-node network. This paper describes the
design of a flexible and simple network management
protocol to control and coordinate the sensors’ functions.
2.0 TRANSIENT ELECTROMAGNETIC
FIELD CHARACTERISTICS AND SYSTEM
DESIGN REQUIREMENTS
Transients generated in power substations have two
significant characteristics: short duration and high
amplitude. The duration of some of the transient field is
as short as several microseconds which are very short
relative to the time spent in steady state operation. The
maximum peak-to-peak amplitudes of measured wire-
borne transients are found to vary from around 1 A to
almost 20 A, and from 0.3 kV to almost 7 Kv [2].
The basic functions of the wireless sensor network are
effective capture and measurement of the short-duration
transient signal in the harsh electromagnetic environment.
The system should satisfy the following requirements:
1) Simultaneous measurement of the sensor nodes:
To measure the transient electromagnetic field’s
distribution, the data from all the measurement nodes
have to be correlated in time, since the transient field
basically is some kind of time-varying field.
Because the ability to discern the time delay between data
acquisition nodes is determined by the sampling
frequency, the best achievable resolution would be one
sampling period. The lower limit of resolution will be the
worst time length from which we can determine the
correlation. Usually there exists no pre-determined period
of transient, therefore a conservative assumption of the
lower limit would be one transient duration to get
acceptable correlation.
2) Low power consumption:
Since the sensor network is powered by batteries, it
should consume as little power as possible. For almost all
transceiver modules, they consume much more power in
CIRED 20th International Conference on Electricity Distribution
active modes than in idle modes. For example, according
to the datasheet of Freescale ZigBee transceiver
MC13192/MC13193 [3], the current consumption is just
35uA in doze mode and 500 uA in idle mode compared
with the 37 mA current in Receiver mode. That means if
all the transceivers stay in active mode for all time, it will
lead to a waste of power and that is not necessary.
Therefore it is preferable for the wireless transceivers to
operate only when required, that is the wireless
transceivers stay in doze or idle mode for some time and
enter active mode for some time, even though the sensors
are probably working all the time.
3) Robustness:
Since the electromagnetic environment is rather harsh, the
wireless network must have some inherent immunity to
these electromagnetic interferences so that it can work
reliably.
4) Simplicity:
Simplicity and easy to use can decrease development cost
and increase the reliability.
3.0 SYSTEM DESIGN
To satisfy these requirements, some strategies are adopted.
3.1 System topology
Fig.2: System topology
Transient measurement is usually conducted in a
determined environment, namely we usually have the
knowledge of node locations, so there is no need to
implement complicated auto-organizing networking
topology like a mesh topology, which needs more
software overhead. Instead we adopt an easy to use tree
topology, even though it could be adapted to other
topologies. As shown in Fig.2, in this network there
would be a master node and one layer or several layers of
slave nodes. The master node would be responsible for
CIRED2009 Session 2 Paper No 0296
Prague, 8-11 June 2009
Paper 0296
the organization and coordination of all measurement
nodes’ activities.
3.2 Simultaneous measurement
In the wireless sensor network, the simultaneous
measurement of data is achieved by a function called
wireless trigger. When one measurement node detects the
transient signal, namely when the local input surpasses
some pre-defined threshold, it will send out a trigger
signal as shown in Fig.3. After receiving the trigger signal,
the measurement nodes will keep the corresponding
sampled data according to the trigger signal’s time
information and stop data sampling and saving.
Guys, start
recording!
Fig.3: The concept of wireless trigger
To realize wireless trigger effectively in a system with
limited memory, the sensor nodes must have a fast
response time to the incoming trigger signal.
However, under some conditions, the trigger signal could
be missed or not effectively received by some nodes. This
happens when the receiver nodes are affected by some
interference or the trigger signal has to pass some other
nodes to arrive at the destination nodes, which will add
some delay to the trigger signal. The first situation would
be improved by resending the trigger signal. But this will
add extra time delay. Therefore, judging the trigger time
by the arrival of trigger signal is not accurate and reliable.
A solution to this issue would be making all the nodes
time synchronized and incorporating the trigger time
information into the trigger signal, which is unchanged
during resending. The destination receiver nodes judge
the trigger time based on the time information
incorporated, thereby ensuring that the receiver
measurement nodes would not be affected by any form of
the trigger signal’s delay. It makes wireless trigger more
reliable and more accurate.
Some time synchronization scheme is implemented in the
CIRED 20th International Conference on Electricity Distribution
system. Fig.4 shows the measured result of time
synchronization, from which we can see the accuracy is
within 1 microsecond. This is shorter than the duration of
a transient field.
Correctted data
5
4
3
Error in microseconds
2
1 mode. Once one slave node power up, it will transmit the
0
0 50 100 150 200 250
-1
-2
-3
-4
-5
Samples
Data of Colum G
Fig.4 Measured time synchronization accuracy
3.3 Measures to decrease power consumption
As mentioned before, the transceivers should only operate
when necessary. That means they are working in TDMA
fashion. In the network, all nodes periodically enter into
listening slot and idle slot, which lasts several listening
slot’s length. In the listening slot, all sensors will receive
a command signal which includes trigger information or
other control information signal. If it includes trigger
information, the receiver sensors will begin to store the
relative sampled data according to the information given
by the trigger. If it includes control information, it will do
something according to the control information it
received.
Besides the information, the command signal in listening
slot also has the function of tracking clock drift. The
receiver-nodes will adjust their clock according to that
signal to keep track of sender node’s clock since there
will be time drift caused by crystal aging and temperature
effect.
In addition, the total time length of the listening slot and
idle slot will be less than that supported by the memory
capacity.
3.4 Measures to improve robustness
To increase the robustness of wireless communications
between nodes, some measures could be implemented:
1) Using some data automatic protection strategies like
FEC(Forward Error Correction) [4], ACK
(Acknowledge packet) and retransmission to ensure
reliable data transmission;
2) Automatically choosing a clean channel by the master
node.
3) Choosing some inherently robust modulation
techniques such as FHSS or DSSS;
4) Using some channel noise energy detect function,
which means the data communication is started only
when the noise energy is lower than some threshold;
CIRED2009 Session 2
Prague, 8-11 June 2009
Paper 0296
5) Using directional antenna on some suitable nodes.
3.5 System workflow
The system can be divided into three functional phases:
initialization, data collecting and data transmission to
remote controller.
Once the master node powers up, it enters the receiver
300 350 400 450 500
Association Request signal, then enter receiver mode.
When the master node receives the request signal, it will
send an ACK signal to the slave node. If after some time,
the slave node doesn’t receiver the ACK signal from the
coordinate, it will resend the request after some random
time. After all slave nodes have been associated with the
master node, they begin the synchronization process.
Thereafter the system enters the data-collecting phase. All
sensor nodes will continually collect data until they are
triggered by itself or the external wireless trigger signal.
After the data collection is completed, the system enters
data transmission phase during which the data from all
sensor nodes would be transferred to one remote
controller, one at a time, under the control of the master
node. When the transmission is completed, the sensor
nodes will be given commands about what to do next by
the remote controller.
4.0 CONCLUSION
The network management protocol described in this paper
not only makes the measurement system more like an
interactive wireless distributed network, the sensor nodes
of which could work cooperatively to get amplitude,
frequency and time information, rather than several static
amplitude-only measurement devices, but also has lower
power consumption and higher robustness.
REFERENCES
[1] W. C. Kotheimer, 1974, “Substation Transients and
Solid State Controls”, Northwest Electric Light and
Power Association 51st annual conference, 8.
[2] Thomas, D.E. Wiggins, E.M. Salas, T.M. Nickle,
F.S. Wright, S.E., 1994, “Induced transients in
substation cable: measurements and models”, IEEE
Trans on Power Delivery, vol.9, 1861-1867.
[3] Freescale Semiconductor, 2007, “MC1321X
datasheet”, 47.
[4] Gabriella Convertino, Silvio Lucio Oliva, 2006,
“Adaptive FEC for 802.11 burst losses reduction”,
Second International Mobile Multimedia
Communications Conference, 1-6.
Paper No 0296