Communication redundancy for substation automation

Parallel Redundancy Protocol (PRP) and High-availability Seamless Redundancy (HSR) have been introduced to address the need for reliable industrial communications and are standardized and specified in IEC 62439-3. While they both address different network topologies, HSR and PRP are based on the same principle of active redundancy by duplicating the information exchange. By providing an active redundancy protocol and therefore a zero delay re-configuration in case of a switch or link failure, HSR and PRP are especially of interest for protection applications based on digital communication such as IEC 61850-9-2 and IEC 61850-8-1. In this paper, we presented different topologies and applications for substation automation using the benefits of PRP and HSR and how such protocols can enforce of the performance requirement specified by IEC 61850-5.