Critical Telecommunication Services Modeling in a Transmission System Power Operator

Abstract

For a Transmission System Power Operator such as Red Electrica de Espana (REE), operating a high power grid in real-time conditions, reliability of its communication circuits are a main concern. REE has developed a high availability communication networks with very low failure rates, its main design criteria being the physical diversity, i.e., the traffic between a given pair of nodes is routed by using several physically disjoint paths. In this setting, we propose an availability-based cost design method in order to design very critical communication services. Previous algorithms for searching the optimal route use additive costs, which can be a loose assumption either when high failure rates can be locally present, or when fully disjoints paths can not always be found. Approximations on the double route availability equations allow us to develop a Bayesian Network framework for network service modeling, which yields a new algorithm outperforming the classical ones when sporadic high error rate elements happen in the network. Simulations and an real case study in the REE network are presented, showing the performance of the proposed method.