On the influence of the number of virtual IEDs in the data traffic of IEC61850 centralized substation protection

Substation Automation Systems (SAS) are currently designed and operated based on IEC 61850 standard. This standard along with the evolution of the information processing technology brings the possibility of developing new centralized SAS architectures based on virtualized protection and control. However, communication latency must be evaluated as it can limit the scalability of virtualized SAS. This paper explores via a practical simulation case the effects of the number of virtual IEDs in the data traffic of a virtualized IEC61850 SAS based on Docker. Simulation results have shown that the increase in the network traffic due to a higher number of virtual IEDs produces a longer delay in tripping operation under a fault condition. Key words. IEC 61850, virtualization, protection, digital substation.