Design of efficient and reliable TCP protocol service for power system communication applications

The current standard based power system communication architectures are at their infancy stage right now. Most of the data retrieval ink are still legacy and the transport protocols don't support real time or any prioritized data flows. The future power system communication architecture requires real time transport protocols that can support multimedia and wireless applications. The multimedia based power system communication requirements are under progress, the standard based interfaces are being defined. The future utilities for inter and intra networks will be based on heterogeneous physical layer protocols, but upper layer transport protocols will be TCP and UDP and the associated services.; Many applications in power system communication will use TCP congestion control to regulate the transmission rate of a data packet stream. A natural way to achieve this goal is to transport the data packet stream on a TCP connection. However, because TCP implements both congestion and error control, transporting a data packet stream directly using a TCP connection forces the data packet stream to be subject to TCP's other properties caused by TCP error control, which may be inappropriate for these applications. The TCP out-of-band approach proposed in this thesis is a novel way of applying TCP congestion control to a data packet stream without actually transporting the data packet stream on a TCP connection. Instead, a TCP connection using the same network path as the data packet stream is set up separately and the transmission rate of the data packet stream is then associated with that of the TCP packets. Since the transmission rate of these TCP packets is under TCP congestion control, so is that of the data packet stream. Fore, since the data packet stream is not transported on a TCP connection, the regulated data packet stream is not subject to TCP error control. Because of this flexibility, the TCP out-of-band approach opens up many new opportunities, solves old problems, and improves the performance of some existing applications. All of these advantages will be demonstrated in the thesis. This thesis presents the power system communication requirements, current status of TCP and UDP performance issues and proposes new approach to design, implement, and analyze the TCP out-of-band approach, and its successful applications in TCP trunking, wireless communication, add multimedia streaming, that will be heavily used in the modern power system communication architectures.