IEC61850 serves good communication media between Station Level SCADA and Bay Level IEDs. Protocol is already in use across various Substation installations in India and Abroad. When people refer to IEC 61850, most of them refer to TCP/IP based IEC 61850 communication via MMS Protocol. Another area which need more focus is inter bay communication via GOOSE Protocol and Process bus communication via Sampled Value Protocol.
GOOSE Communication Protocol is one of the efficient, cost effective and high speed event transfer mechanism between Intelligent Electronic Devices. These Ethernet packets virtually allows connections between IEDs providing good media for transferring interlock and trip signals with performance throughput of (up to) four milliseconds. Advantages of its interoperable behavior is not yet fully extracted in current – on going installations.
Sampled Value Protocol for Process Bus communication is another area whose features are yet to be utilized in future Substation installations. One-to-many communication at required sampling rate will help in monitoring analog signals from multiple protection devices. Redundancy at Bay level to monitor and control process level devices will be very cost effective by using this technology.
