Practical architecture considerations for Smart Grid WAN network

Over the past few years, utility applications and services have been evolving from stand alone propriety protocol based to a standardized IP platform based [1]. These utility applications include Synchrophasors, CRAS, SCADA etc. During the same period, use of the enterprise network has moved from simple IP applications to an ever increasing number of advanced technologies being collapsed onto the IP infrastructure. These enterprise applications include video, telephony, storage and physical access security. As critical services such as Voice, Video and SCADA data converge on IP, the resiliency; scalability and availability of the WAN infrastructures become critical. The new converged network must adopt to meet the new stringent requirements while still maintaining flexibility and ease of operations. This paper will start by describing the services and the corresponding communication requirements that the future utility WAN must support. The paper will then propose various architecture models to satisfy the requirements. The paper concludes with comparison of the proposed models against various network optimization criteria.