A feasibility study of using Manufacturing Message Specification report gateway model for IEC61850 inter-substation type-1 messaging over Wide Area Network

Abstract

This paper presents a feasibility study of using TCP-based MMS report gateway model for transmitting type-1 messages over WAN. In IEC61850-90-5:2012, the Standard suggests to use UDP-based R-GOOSE for exchanging the type-1 messages, i.e. trip signals and other fast messages defined in the Standard, over WAN. However, due to the cyclic retransmission inherited from GOOSE, R-GOOSE messages are repeatedly sent to the network and thus pose unnecessary traffic to the WAN. With the proposed model, unnecessary re-transmissions can be eliminated. It can preserve bandwidth for more IEDs being imposed on the existing smart grid. To achieve this task, two IEC61850-based gateways for translating GOOSE Messages to and from the MMS report over WAN have been modeled and implemented. The authors then make use of an HLA-complied co-simulation platform to simulate a distance protection scenario through the gateways to investigate the communication latency with different links speed and utilization rate of WAN. Simulated results show that the proposed MMS report gateway model works well for different WAN link speed from DS3 to 1000BaseX. Simulation results further indicate that introducing QoS control to the WAN routers is an effective method to warrant the latency for satisfying the IEC61850 standard requirement. The result from this feasibility study reveals that the TCP-based MMS report gateway model indeed can be used as an extended feature for transmitting type-1 messages between substations over WAN. Furthermore, this method is suitable for connecting more IEC61850-based DER to the existing smart grid involving WAN.