Introduction to Baselining the Ethernet Traffic of Substation Communication Networks

With the development of modern communication technologies and new communication protocols, e.g., the seamless redundancy protocol HSR/PRP, the IEEE 1588v2 (PTP), and IEC 61850, the communication network plays a more important role in current relay applications, such as the automatic transfer switch (ATS) application, the communication-assisted protection schemes and the sample measurement values (SMV). Therefore setting up and maintaining reliable Substation Communication Networks (SCN) becomes a critical issue for the grid operator. This paper introduces the process of maintaining and inspecting the communication baseline of the SCN to help to prevent communication failure, detecting intrusion and expediting troubleshooting. In this paper, the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model is employed. The requirement of basic understanding of Ethernet protocols (e.g. ICMP, TCP and IP), commands (e.g. ping, tracert) and hardware and software tools (e.g. the nTAP and the Wireshark) is also discussed.