  With the proposition to install a large number of phasor measurement units
(PMUs) in the future power grid, it is essential to provide robust
communications infrastructure for phasor data across the network. We make
progress in this direction by devising a simple time division multiplexing
scheme for transmitting phasor data from the PMUs to a central server: Time is
divided into frames and the PMUs take turns to transmit to the control center
within the time frame. The main contribution of this work is a scheduling
policy based on which PMU transmissions are ordered during a time frame.
  The scheduling scheme is independent of the approach taken to solve the PMU
placement problem, and unlike strategies devised for conventional
communications, it is intended for the power network since it is fully governed
by the measure of electrical connectedness between buses in the grid. To
quantify the performance of the scheduling scheme, we couple it with a fault
detection algorithm used to detect changes in the susceptance parameters in the
grid. Results demonstrate that scheduling the PMU transmissions leads to an
improved performance of the fault detection scheme compared to PMUs
transmitting at random.
