Monitoring communication QoS parameters of distributed energy resources

Paper presents a methodology and experimental measurements of communication performance in testing environment between virtual power plant (VPP) and remote terminal units (RTUs) that are normally installed at the distributed energy resources (DERs) for monitoring and control purposes. Experimental measurements were conducted during one-week testing period with VPP and two RTUs, placed in geographically different locations, acting as DERs. Among the RTUs and VPP two different communication channels were utilized for required connectivity: cellular and wired channel. For data exchange IEC 60870-5-104 protocol was implemented and tested for envisaged real site deployment. Based on network traffic recordings captured at the VPP server communication performance was determined. Quality of Service (QoS) parameters were selected with emphasis on round trip times (RTT), packet loss and traffic load. Experimental results show better performance (lower RTT, packet loss, and packet latency) in the case of RTU1 with wired Ethernet connection compared to RTU2 connection with cellular network for data transfer.