Lossless compression of synchronized phasor measurements

Abstract

By reporting time-synchronized phasor magnitudes and phase angles at rates at or above the system frequency, phasor measurement units promise to dramatically increase our ability to understand both historical and real-time power system conditions. This new information does not come without a cost, however, and one potential barrier to the effective utilization of this new data source is the increased amount of information transmission and storage capability these devices require. One way to mitigate the increased storage requirements of synchrophasor data is to compress the data, although this compression should not come at the cost of reduced accuracy. This paper proposes a new method for the lossless compression of voltage magnitude and phase data in which known characteristics of the power system are used to improve upon common, off-the-shelf compression techniques. The method is evaluated with real and simulated PMU data to show its effectiveness.