An Enhanced Industrial Wireless Communication Network for Hard Real Time Performance Substation Automation Purposes

Abstract

Wireless communication network (WCN) technologies are charming solutions to bolster the conventional electrical substations with the intention of take the fashion of smart substation such as reduction in equipment, minimize the maintenance costs, flexibility, and expansion. However, the harsher challenge facing WCN employing in the electrical substation is the real time protection of substation automation system (SAS) for the high voltage devices in terms of the latency and the reliability in particular the substations of old topologies. This work suggests WCN including special types of the intermediate devices (Switched-Access Points (S-AP) and Multi Wireless Domain- Access Point (MWD-AP)) to address the expected packets congestion by creating independent wireless channels domains offering wireless channels reliability in such network topology that deals with real time data traffic (RT) and the non-real time data traffic (NRT). Riverbed modeler is adopted to simulate the model of the electrical substation network due to the rich tools of communication networks in term of industry environment. The results indicate, the suggested WCN can handle the hard real time requirements of protection from latency and data reliability points of view in case of basic capacity of 802.11a/n standards at the level of ≤ 4 msec and high data reliability.