Title:A Novel Scheduling Service for Distribution Pilot Protection Over a WiMAX Network
VOLUME: 2 ISSUE: 1
Author(s):Reduan H. Khan, Kaushik Mahata and Jamil Y. Khan
Affiliation:School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, The University of Newcastle, Callaghan NSW 2308, Australia.
Keywords:Pilot Protection, WiMAX, Radio Resource Scheduling, Machine-to-Machine Communication, Protection and Control.Pilot Protection, WiMAX, Radio Resource Scheduling, Machine-to-Machine Communication, Protection and Control.Pilot Protection, WiMAX, Radio Resource Scheduling, Machine-to-Machine Communication, Protection and Control.
Abstract:One of the key objectives of a smart grid is to provide reliable protection and control mechanisms in
distribution networks. Pilot protection schemes being one of the most effective methods of protecting networked
distribution lines, are extensively used in high voltage transmission grids. Pilot protection schemes use high-speed, interrelay
communications for fast fault detection and isolation. The use of a broadband wireless access network such as
IEEE802.16 based WiMAX can significantly extend the reach of a pilot protection scheme by providing a fast, reliable
and pervasive communications alternative. However, significant challenges exist in terms of radio resource allocation to
support such an event-driven, machine-to-machine (M2M) communication traffic over a WiMAX network which is
traditionally optimized for various multimedia applications. As a solution, this paper proposes a novel radio resource
scheduling service called Expedited Effort (EE) that uses a differentiated random access and a prioritized grant mechanism
to transfer the time-critical pilot protection messages. Performance evaluation is conducted for both of the existing Best
Effort (BE) and the proposed EE services under varying traffic load and channel conditions using a discrete-event
simulation model based on OPNET. The simulation study reveals that while the existing BE service fails to meet the
challenging QoS requirements of a pilot protection scheme, the proposed EE service provides satisfactory performance
even under quite difficult channel conditions.
