IEC 61850 Packet Generator for Testing Substation Communication

The IEC 61850 standard provides services, protocols, and a language to ease modeling and communication of IEDs (Intelligent Electronic Devices) and supervision devices in power system automation. However, functional and vulnerability testing in IEC 61850 substations can become a non-trivial and expensive task. The event-based behavior of the GOOSE protocol hampers performance tests on IEC 61850 networks. Also, the processing cycle of IEDs itself limits communication speed by tying the sending rate to its cycle. The obstacles found in changing the values of attributes in real IEDs are also a limitation while performing vulnerability tests. This paper proposes a packet generator that allows users to create and send packets according to GOOSE, SV and MMS protocols using a graphical interface. This sets our proposal apart from other tools discussed in this paper, by providing a user-friendly interface that focuses specifically on generating packets for each IEC 61850 protocol to make it easy to run performance and vulnerability tests. Another contribution is an evaluation of programming languages suitability for implementing a packet generator due to temporal constraints defined for GOOSE and SV protocols.