Smartgrid communication for protection purposes

- Supervisor Øivind Kure & Poul Heegaard, NTNU

The current protection systems, based on the IEC 61850 standard for substation automation, use link layer multicast. They rely on a homogenous communication system where one transmission reaches all possible recipient. The configuration is therefore simple. The Quality of service (QoS; delay, packet loss and delay jitter) is almost constant with no variation between different sources and receivers. Extending this beyond the substation (a single Ethernet) is challenging, since these assumption do no longer apply. The QoS will be heterogeneous and vary in both space and time. Distributed control, and distributed sources imply dynamic configuration of the flows of control and data. In a wide area multicast setting, there is always a trade-off between robustness, load, and reliability of packet delivery, delay and delay jitter. The challenge is to design network services with sufficient QoS for the new real time control algorithms that will scale beyond the substation. The cyber security aspects are important for multicast systems, which are vulnerable for misconfiguration, attacks and manipulation. In summary, the issues to be addressed are:

• Optimal data management and availability to real-time distributed control processes.
• Robust unicast and multicast architecture, protocols and services for the extended protection control system.
• Dynamic configuration of multicast delivery adapted to distributed sources and dynamic protection algorithms.
• Cybersecurity measures and their effect on real-time performance.
• Evaluation of suitability of new commutations technologies like Software defined networking (SDN) in protection systems.