Phasor measurement units (PMUs) are being widely installed in the transmission grid. Many power system applications based on PMUs have been developed or are under development in academia and industry. For those applications, data latency is often a critical factor that affects their performance thus making the topology of the communication network that exchanges real time data between the control center (CC) and substations (SS) of vital importance.

Although scholars have already studied and examined the communication systems for the smart grid and its requirements, infrastructures and technologies have been already discussed, the investigation of communication network topology is relatively rare. Therefore, a systematic process to study the communication topology and the interaction between the communication system topology and power system control needs to be introduced.

This dissertation first introduces a method to conceptualize and analyze possible communication topologies by simulating them in Network Simulator 3 (NS3). Second, a new algorithm is developed to optimize the clustering of substations in such a way that the data latency performance of the decentralized communication topology can meet the requirements for PMU based applications. Third, a communication behavior of losing a communication device is examined. An algorithm to locate communication weak links and nodes and two additional topologies to address the contingency issue are both developed.

The IEEE 118-bus system is used as the test case. Two PMU based wide area controls for are simulated. The first one is conducted in the Powerworld Simulator and the second one is simulated by using MATLAB. It is concluded from the simulation results that 1) the decentralized communication topology designed by optimizing the substation cluster boundaries can help PMU based applications achieve good performance by limiting data latency to an acceptable level and 2) when considering the communication contingency, the proposed circular communication topology might be a suitable choice for power system wide area control. This dissertation can also provide a technical guidance for power utilities to choose their most suitable communication topology.