Implementation architecture of IEC 60870-5-103 communication protocol on arm platform running on RTOS for industrial IEDs

Embedded systems and their applications share a significant proportion of products developed and manufactured in electrical industries today. Power system automation and digitalization applications widely use micro-controller based architectures. These include relay modules, monitoring and control systems etc. Many of these products use standard IEC protocols for their communication architecture. Although the IEC protocol standards are well defined and have been in use for many years, development and implementation of these protocol stacks and source code depends on the developer. Optimized architecture and implementation of communication based on the protocol improves the performance of the communicating module in terms of speed, reliability and save processor and memory resource. In this paper, we propose an optimized, time efficient and robust architecture and implementation of IEC 60870-5-103 communication protocol on an ARM based micro-controller board running on a Real Time Operating System(RTOS). This architecture improves the implementation of protocol compared to conventional methods of implementation without an RTOS. It improves the protocol latency or speed of communication using the protocol. It also improves the data fetching time required by the slave device and the minimum possible time between requests from master. Testing is done for both proposed and conventional architectural implementations on the same hardware platform as mentioned. The test results shown in the paper compares the proposed implementation architecture to the conventional architecture and shows the improvements that the proposed architecture brings in terms of speed and latency of communication. Methodology, architecture, implementation and results for the same are detailed in the paper.