A Tool to Characterize Delays and Packet Losses in Power Systems With Synchrophasor Data

This paper describes the implementation of a tool to estimate latencies and data dropouts in communication networks transferring synchrophasor data defined by the C37.118 standard. The tool assigns a time tag to synchrophasor packets at the time it receives them according to a global positioning system clock and with this information is able to determine the time those packets took to reach the tool. The tool is able to connect simultaneously to multiple phasor measurement units (PMUs) sending packets at different reporting rates with different transport protocols such as user datagram protocol or transmission control protocol. The tool is capable of redistributing every packet it receives to a different device while recording the exact time this information is re-sent into the network. The results of measuring delays from a PMU using this tool are presented and compared with those of a conventional network analyzer. The results show that the tool presented in this paper measures delays more accurately and precisely than the conventional network analyzer.