Ongoing IEC 61850 standardization activities aim at improved grid reliability through advanced monitoring and remote control services in medium- and low-voltage. However, extending energy automation beyond the substation boundaries introduces the need for timely and reliable information exchange over wide areas. LTE appears as a promising solution since it supports extensive coverage, low latency, high throughput and Quality-of-Service (QoS) differentiation. In this paper, the feasibility of implementing IEC 61850 services over public LTE infrastructure is investigated. Since standard LTE cannot meet the stringent latency requirements of such services, a new LTE QoS class is introduced along with a new LTE scheduler that prioritizes automation traffic with respect to background human-centric traffic. Two representative grid automation services are considered, a centralized (MMS) and a distributed one (GOOSE), and the achievable latency/throughput performance is evaluated on a radio system simulator platform. Simulations of realistic overload scenarios demonstrate that properly designed LTE schedulers can successfully meet the performance requirements of IEC 61850 services with negligible impact on background traffic.
['Charalampos Kalalas', 'Lazaros Gkatzikis', 'Carlo Fischione', 'Per Ljungberg', 'Jesus Alonso-Zarate']
Enabling IEC 61850 communication services over public LTE infrastructure