Analysis of an IEC 61850 based Electric Substation Communication Architecture

The ever-increasing demand for power and limitations on upgrade have led to increased operating voltages and consequently, larger and number of Substations. Substation Automation systems (SAS) are responsible for the protection, monitoring and control of electric equipment within an electric substation. The big evolution for SAS came with introduction of IEC 61850 standard for power utilities that provides integrated and interoperable data communications within and around Substation. In order to realize the benefits of the standard, the SAS design engineering needs to be thoughtful of practical challenges such as implementation of communication network. The success of SAS depends largely on efficient and reliable communication architecture design. In this paper, we present an analysis of the performance of communication infrastructure using the experimental set up of typical substation architecture. This set up is then used to examine sample substation architectures to determine if they meet the communication performance requirements.