Application of digital protection based on IEC 62439-3 encompassing PRP and HSR topologies in a HV substation

Zero recovery time is an essential feature of a digital protection scheme. All faults must be cleared reliably and at the fastest time as possible during a fault scenario in the network. Due to inadequate redundancies in protection system available in IEC 61850 protocol, the International Electro-technical Commission (IEC) working committee proposed an improved IEC 62439-3 standard, which encompasses Parallel Redundancy Protocol (PRP) and High-availability Seamless Redundancy (HSR) topologies that have redundancy features in-built within the topologies to digitally protect critical assets. These two schemes have zero recovery time in the event of a fault with minimum frame losses in the event of packet errors. Furthermore, additional issues such as single port failure and interoperability problems related to multi-vendor equipment in the network have been addressed in IEC 62439-3. The IED's based on this improved standard contains Doubly Attached Node (DAN) components and provides redundancy in protection with two active frames circulating in a ring topology. This paper applies PRP and HSR topologies in digital protection system and compares the performances of frame circulation delay and latencies in PRP and HSR topologies. The authors highlight End to End (ETE) delays based on IEC 62439-3 due to faster processing capabilities, increased availability and minimum delay in data packet transfer. At the conclusion, the authors recommend suitable application on PRP and HSR topologies in a Substation Automation System (SAS) with Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) on an Optimized Network Engineering Tool (OPNET) modeler platform.