Edge Computing for Power Quality Monitoring in Low Voltage Networks : Low-bandwidth standards-based power quality monitoring at the edge

Abstract

Edge-fog-cloud IoT architectures applied to smart grids have been a subject of research interest in the past several years as a supplement or replacement for centralized distribution management systems. This paper implements an edge-fog architecture for communicating filtered power quality information based on the EN 50160 voltage quality standard over an MQTT network, enabling efficient and modular power quality monitoring of low voltage grids. A 24-hour test of the implemented system was performed on a hardware based grid simulation at the Real Time Digital Simulator lab in Tampere University. The simulation results show a reasonable reduction in bandwidth and effective database storage by filtering packets that do not violate the EN 50160 voltage quality standard, a sufficient condition for performing power quality tests based on the standard. This paper demonstrates that real-time decentralized monitoring of low voltage networks may be achieved through utilizing an edge-fog architecture between customer smart meters and local secondary substations.