Digital Electrical Substation Communications Based on Deterministic Time-Sensitive Networking Over Ethernet

Abstract

This work presents a novel use case with Time-Sensitive Networks (TSN) for implementing a deterministic system allowing the joint transmission of all substation communications over the same Ethernet-based infrastructure. This approach streamlines the transition to Smart Grid by simplifying the typically complex architecture of electrical substations, characterized by multiple field buses and bridging devices. Thus, Smart Grid represents a disruptive innovation advancing substations to an ''all-digital'' environment with a uniform interface to access, manage, and update their communications and variables. TSN can serve as its underlying foundation as it is based on open, interoperable standards and enhancements for Ethernet that can establish deterministic communications with bounded end-to-end latency. This is shown with a TSN Proof of Concept (PoC) in a real-life substation that can integrate its most usual signals: digitized analog triggers for critical events or interlocks, GOOSE signaling (IEC 61850), and Best-Effort ''Internet-like'' traffic. This TSN PoC is shown to be versatile enough to propagate digitized critical events around 160 µs earlier than legacy substation equipment while preserving the integrity of background traffic. Furthermore, its flexibility was characterized in-depth in controlled laboratory tests, thereby confirming TSN as a viable alternative for supporting Smart Grid so long as the appropriate configuration is supplied. INDEX TERMS Deterministic communications, digital substation, smart grid, TSN. I. INTRODUCTION. SMART GRID AND THE MOTIVATION FOR THE APPLICATION OF TSN NETWORKS

Communication Scheduling for Control Performance in TSN-Based Fog Computing Platforms

“…The details of the test cases are shown in Table 5. The hardware platform is presented in [22] and consists of three TSN switches that are connected in a daisy chain manner. The first and the last switches consist internal ESes.…”

“…We have also evaluated the performance of CACSS on the hardware platform from [22] and in this context we removed the assumption that the forwarding delay is ignored. For this evaluation, we assumed that all the SWs are the same type as presented in [22]. The authors proposed the following equation for capturing the forwarding delay d in µs: where c is the size of the flows in bytes.…”

“…The authors proposed the following equation for capturing the forwarding delay d in µs: where c is the size of the flows in bytes. Although we are using this TSN switch hardware implementation in a different application scenario compared to [22], since the forwarding delay model depends on the hardware implementation and not the application scenario, their delay model is also applicable to our case. To be closer to implementation, CACSS can also consider the scheduling of PPTP flows for time synchronization.…”

Precise Network Time Monitoring: Picosecond-Level Packet Timestamping for Fintech Networks

“…In this module, a reference clock (clkA) is sampled by a slower frequency copy (clkPLL) generated by a Phase Locked Loop (PLL). clkPLL has a frequency difference determined by a fixed value N as showed in (1), which is defined to be 16384 in the default design. clkPLL is used as a common clock to sample clkA and the measured clock (clkB).…”

“…Smart cities and grids, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), telecom, wireless networks, electronic trading, vehicular communications or Internet of Things (IoT) are examples of the rise in distributed synchronized networks with demanding requirements in terms of bandwidth, latency or monitoring [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6].…”