Communication solutions for power utilities
UNIVERSAL TELEPROTECTION TPU-1
INSTALLATION AND COMMISSIONING MANUAL Web version TPU-1R - Rev. 5.9 (May 2018)
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APPENDIX B
IEC 61850 STANDARD
The latest tendency amongst power utilities is to give great importance to the automation of
substations. The demanding requirements for quality of service given to consumers,
together with the growing complexity of the technology, has lead to the definition of a new
automation standard represented by the IEC 61850 standard.
The standard defines the different elements by means of an object-oriented procedure and
normalizes the stack of communication protocols in such a way as to ensure the
compatibility between products of different manufacturers and the direct functioning
between elements of a different nature, such as for example, between protections and
teleprotections.
The basic characteristics of the IEC 61850 architecture are the following:
The different elements of the substation, such as teleprotections, protections, etc, all use
the same stack of protocols, with a GOMSFE (Generic Object Modelling for Substation
Feeder and Equipment) object-oriented application layer.
The different elements, generically known as IED (Intelligent Electronic Device),
communicate with one another by means of a LAN substation network. Normally, this LAN
consists of a Fast Ethernet by optical fiber (100Base-FX) with double star topology.
Star topology implies the use of hub type devices in a first level, and switch type in a
second level. The advantage of hub is its simplicity and low cost. However, it cannot
separate traffic and, therefore, all the information sent by the IED is received by all the
IEDs connected to the same hub. The advantage of switch is that it allows the traffic to be
separated according to the destination of the Ethernet frames, increasing in this way the
global capacity of the network at the expense of however a higher complexity and cost.
