Abstract
At present, the standardisation of electrical equipment communications is on the rise. In particular, manufacturers are releasing equipment for the smart grid endowed with communication protocols such as DNP3, IEC 61850, and MODBUS. However, there are legacy equipment operating in the electricity distribution network that cannot communicate using any of these protocols. Thus, we propose an infrastructure to allow the integration of legacy electrical equipment to smart grids by using wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this infrastructure, each legacy electrical device is connected to a sensor node, and the sink node runs a middleware that enables the integration of this device into a smart grid based on suitable communication protocols. This middleware performs tasks such as the translation of messages between the power substation control centre (PSCC) and electrical equipment in the smart grid. Moreover, the infrastructure satisfies certain requirements for communication between the electrical equipment and the PSCC, such as enhanced security, short response time, and automatic configuration. The paper’s contributions include a solution that enables electrical companies to integrate their legacy equipment into smart-grid networks relying on any of the above mentioned communication protocols. This integration will reduce the costs related to the modernisation of power substations.
Highlights
Electricity generation, transmission, and distribution are essential for the development of modern society
Given that the converter layer of the proposed middleware must receive messages that comply with standard protocols for smart grids and translate them into a format recognised by the wireless sensor networks (WSNs), we proposed a memory mapping to facilitate this translation in previous research [62]
After preparing the experimental setup, we performed a test to validate the middleware converter layer, i.e., to determine whether the requests made by the ScadaBR or Distributed Test Manager (DTM) [39] using any of the smart-grid protocols (DNP3, IEC 61850, or Modbus) were fulfilled
Summary
Electricity generation, transmission, and distribution are essential for the development of modern society. Their underlying monitoring and control activities are performed by a variety of electrical system components. The interconnection, communication, and control of these devices are embodied by the concept of smart grid, which is explained in [1,2,3,4,5]. Another trend aims to monitor electrical equipment that is installed outside the power substation, at electricity distribution or transmission lines, or even at the point of consumption.
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