IEC 61850-based Distance Protection

IEC 61850 has emerged as a de-facto standard for power utilities due to its object-oriented approach. It ensures interoperability among multi-vendor devices. The performance evaluation of IEC 61850 devices must be carried out in terms of latency, throughput, jitter etc., before their deployment. This requires a HIL setup with IEC 61850-based IEDs and a network simulator for performance evaluation. A HIL setup comprising of emulated IEC 61850 GOOSE sender, GOOSE receiver and network simulator is developed, as shown in Figure 1. An inter-substation application of distance protection was considered. The GOOSE signal from Substation A to B was sent through IP tunnelling as per IEC 61850-90-2. The end-to-end latency was found within the stipulated range (<3ms) as set forth by the IEC 61850 standard. This validates the stringent performance requirement of the IEC 61850 GOOSE-based scheme for achieving accelerated distance protection.

HIL setup for GOOSE tunneling.
Figure 1: HIL setup for GOOSE tunneling.


Aftab, M.A., Roostaee, S., Suhail Hussain, S.M., Ali, I., Thomas, M.S. and Mehfuz, S. (2018), Performance evaluation of IEC 61850 GOOSE-based inter-substation communication for accelerated distance protection scheme. IET Gener. Transm. Distrib., 12: 4089-4098. https://doi.org/10.1049/iet-gtd.2018.5481