Extended Dual Virtual Paths Algorithm Considering the Timing Requirements of IEC61850 Substation Message Types

Abstract

The high-availability seamless redundancy ( HSR) protocol is a representative protocol that fulfills the reliability requirements of the IEC61850-based substation automation system ( SAS). However, it has the drawback of creating unnecessary traffic in a network. To solve this problem, a dual virtual path ( DVP) algorithm based on HSR was recently presented. Although this algorithm dramatically reduces network traffic, it does not consider the substation timing requirements of messages in an SAS. To reduce unnecessary network traffic in an HSR ring network, we introduced a novel packet transmission ( NPT) algorithm in a previous work that considers IEC61850 message types. To further reduce unnecessary network traffic, we propose an extended dual virtual paths ( EDVP) algorithm in this paper that considers the timing requirements of IEC61850 message types. We also include sending delay ( SD), delay queue ( DQ), and traffic flow latency ( TFL) features in our proposal. The source node sends data frames without SDs on the primary paths, and it transmits the duplicate data frames with SDs on the secondary paths. Since the EDVP algorithm discards all of the delayed data frames in DQs when there is no link or node failure, unnecessary network traffic can be reduced. We demonstrate the principle of the EDVP algorithm and its performance in terms of network traffic compared to the standard HSR, NPT, and DVP algorithm using the OPNET network simulator. Throughout the simulation results, the EDVP algorithm shows better traffic performance than the other algorithms, while guaranteeing the timing requirements of IEC61850 message types. Most importantly, when the source node transmits heavy data traffic, the EDVP algorithm shows greater than 80% and 40% network traffic reduction compared to the HSR and DVP approaches, respectively.