Performance analysis of LEO satellites based communication systems for remote monitoring and protection of power components

In the paper the main performances of TCP/IP communication services based on Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites technologies have been analyzed in order to evaluate their suitability with a typical set of power monitoring functionalities. As experimental test bed, a microcontroller based unit for remote monitoring and protection of power components has been equipped with a bi-directional satellite communication system based on the LEO satellites of the Globalstar® consortium. Thanks to the adoption of this facility several figure of merits characterizing the main performances of the satellite data services have been evaluated. They comprise in particular the connection times, the degradation of services and the effective throughput for both packet and asynchronous data connections. The obtained experimental results show as the application of LEO satellite based communication technologies, compared to geo-stationary (GEO) satellites data links, exhibits a set of intrinsic advantages that could be particularly gainful in power system monitoring.