IEC 61850: Methods to Increase Resiliency of Communications

This session discusses Ethernet as best-effort service providing basic packet delivery services without guarantees. It attempts delivery to the destination data link layer but takes no steps to recover packets that are lost or misdirected. To improve resilience of the applications, designers must both add protocol mechanisms at higher levels of the OSI stack to compensate for lost or delayed packets and technologies within the communications network to detect Ethernet faults and take corrective action. Packet management for IEC 61850 protocols are enhanced via IEEE and IEC proprietary and non-proprietary methods and resilience of the communications network is improved by compensating for Ethernet failures within data flow paths. IEC 62439 Part 1 describes resiliency via recoverability methods including spanning tree algorithm (STA) and software defined networking (SDN) without human interaction. IEC 62439 Part 3 describes non-resilient, repairable Parallel Redundancy Protocol (PRP) or High-Availability Seamless Redundancy (HSR) where faults are detected and repaired by human interaction.