D1 substation automation based on IEC61850 and Zigbee

Substation Automation is a modern approach capitalizing on the advancement in Information and Communication Technology to provide compact self healing and more reliable substations. In this quest, wireless communication technologies provide a brilliant option to reduce the connection effort. The vision is eventually to obtain equipment that may be described as “plug and play”. Nevertheless, the Substation environment is best describes as an electromagnetically harsh environment. To that end, the Zigbee technology is considered as an option. The advantage that Zigbee provides is the availability of multitude of parallel paths. Consequently, if one path is unavailable or “un-fit” to relay the message, another will do. The scope of this paper is to introduce a model of power system automation based on IEC 61850 and Zigbee wireless sensor networks (WSN) technology. The model considered is that of a D1 substation (Distribution substation with less than 5 controlled elements). The model is used to calculate time delays for Zigbee wireless network. Monte Carlo simulation is used to provide statistics to compare message delays in Zigbee to the IEC 61850 requirements. Results show that using multiple channels will improve performance to the fulfillment of IEC 61850 requirements.