Feasibility Study for Substation Communication using Parallel Redundant Wireless Technology

Sammanfattning: Substations are an integral part of electric energy transmission and distribution system. With the evolution of conventional substations as digital substations, and in parallel, with the revolutionized emergence of communication systems, new communication schemes are being designed and retrofitted to incorporate the data from relays, circuit breakers and Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) to integrate with the new digital substations.The thesis thus aims in evaluating a few wireless technologies to address the availability and reliability at the process level of Digital Substation System. It is achieved by introducing a redundant wireless network in parallel to existing wired solutions. For the purpose three wireless technologies IEEE 802.11g and Standalone 4G LTE network Base Station (BS) have been evaluated experimentally in a laboratory environment and 5G has been evaluated in a software simulated environment.The experimental results corresponding to IEEE 802.11g and 4G had their own limitations and faced a few challenges in meeting the process level Sampled Value data requirements. Whereas 5G showed a positive result in most of the scenarios, meeting the process bus requirement in terms of latency and packet loss.