Applying AFDX to improve the real-time performance of substation communication network

The substation communication network based on the conventional Switched Ethernet is not deterministic. Applying AFDX, this paper presents a novel Switched Ethernet architecture, of which the latency up bound is calculable rather than probabilistic. Besides, the theoretical analysis based on a worst case of substation fault is launched and the latency up bound of each message type is obtained with the Network Calculus. This scheme is verified by comparing the derived results with the requirements specified by IEC61550.