A Communication Architecture for Inter-substation Communication

In the realm of substation automation (SA), communication infrastructure plays a vital role in mediating between physical and virtual worlds of substation. Specification of data exchanges through standardized communication stacks is therefore an important issue for all substation equipment manufacturers seeking to provide vendor interoperability. As communication arena is changing day by day, the need for efficient and reliable communication infrastructure to address SA is evident. In this respect, a communication network constitutes the core of the SA, thus the design of cost-effective and reliable network architecture is a crucial task. Most of the existing communication networks claim to address the need of communication architecture for SA but in some regard these claims just could not fulfill the constraints imposed by highly available environment for SA. This paper presents a survey and analysis of the current state-of-the-art communication infrastructure in the SA and proposes giga-bit Ethernet topology and E-PON based architecture.