Nobody but you: MAC scheduling for voltage regulation in smart grid

The increasing availability of distributed energy resources (DERs) and sensors in smart grid, as well as overlaying communication network, provides substantial potential benefits for improving the power system's reliability. In this paper, the problem of sensor selection is studied for the MAC layer design of wireless sensor networks for regulating the voltages in smart grid. The framework of hybrid dynamical system is proposed, using Kalman filter for voltage state estimation, and linear-quadratic regulator (LQR) feedback controller for voltage adjustment. The approach to obtain the optimal sensor selection sequence is studied. A sub-optimal sequence is obtained by applying the sliding window algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed sensor selection strategy achieves a 40% performance gain over the baseline algorithm of the round-robin sensor polling.