Use case study on a decentralized modular device network for wide-area monitoring, protection and control

This paper describes a use case study on a novel Intelligent Electronics Device (IED) network for wide-area power system monitoring, protection and control (WAMPAC), featuring wide-area Ethernet and IEEE 1588-based time synchronization associated with decentralized modular devices. Use cases include configurable WAMPAC system architecture accommodating various applications and enabling redundant configurations, wide-area integrated primary and backup protection with a current differential scheme, and special protection with centralized synchronous cyclic and data-driven communication and processing. Preliminary evaluations and experiments indicate that the wide-area current differential protection requires a bandwidth of several tens or hundreds of Mbps for its Ethernet network, and that IEEE 1588-embedded IEDs associated with an off-the-shelf IEEE 1588 time server achieve time synchronization accuracy to within a few microseconds. The need for wide-area network engineering guides is also discussed.