Analysis of end-to-end delay characteristics among various packet sizes in modern substation communication systems based on IEC 61850

Substation plays an important part for electricity generation, transmission and distribution systems, where voltage is stepped up/down or vice versa. The substation serves as a center point of all kind of connection between various power system networks, such as distribution line from electricity generation to household or industrial consumers. Hence, the performance of the substation should be maintained at all times with proper implementation of substation communication systems. A reliable substation communication system relies on the performance of data transmission’s end-to-end delay characteristics in the substation communication systems. In this paper, we modelled, simulated and compared the end-to-end delay characteristics among different data packet sizes as well as different types of substation network topologies using IEC 61850. The simulation results confirmed that the larger packet sizes have higher amount of delays compare to the smaller packet sizes. Besides that, communication network topology with higher number of components obtained the results with a higher amount of end-to-end delays. Therefore, based on the simulated results, it is recommended to reduce the end-to-end delay of substation communication’s data flow for a sustainable and reliable modern power system.