Traditional damping controllers of wide-area power systems (WAPSs) are not able to solve the inter-area oscillation problem effectively owing to lack of global vision. It weakens the power transfer capability and even the stability of WAPSs. The installation of a large number of phase measurement units brings about the system-wide synchronized measurements. Considering that conventional periodic control solutions have placed an excessive burden on the cyber infrastructure, in this paper, two advanced aperiodic control schemes are designed based on the real-time global synchronized measurements. Two control schemes, that is, zero-order-hold event-triggered control and self-triggered control, are developed for wide-area damping control with the minimum communication between the control center and the actuators. The control center only updates control signals for the actuators when certain conditions are triggered, and there is no communication occurrence for the rest of time. Thus, they have mild requirements on communication and computation. The algorithms are tested through simulations of WAPS models with different levels of details. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and benefits of the control design.