Communication aspects in the distributed control architecture of a modular multilevel converter

Several authors researched on the use of digital communications in the control of Modular Multilevel Converters, but, in our opinion, three characteristics of this solution need more discussion: transmission media, synchronization accuracy, and network topology. In this paper, we also address the gap of modeling the communications with more details. For this, we propose a simple cosimulation strategy that relies on the fact that the control and power circuits have no real-time influence in the operation of the communication network. We present simulations with OMNeT++ and Matlab/Simulink to demonstrate the importance of a more detailed modeling of the system.

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