Towards a modular and scalable design for the communications of electrical protection relays

The present work proposes the use of a combination of standardized middleware technologies, such as CORBA-RT and DDS in order to build electrical protection relays in a modular and scalable way. Both CORBA and DDS follow different approaches, while CORBA is basically a client / server architecture, DDS follows the publisher/subscriber paradigm. However, IEDs generate different types of traffic that could be mapped to either CORBA, or DDS operations, leaving DDS for the most critical ones: the distribution of periodic samples values and substation events. The paper also analyses the behaviour of DDS for these types of operations.