IEC 61850-90-12 “Wide Area Network Engineering Guidelines”

The first draft Technical Report (TR) for the future IEC TR 61850-90-12 has been published the other day (57/1536/DTR):

IEC 61850-90-12 TR: Communication networks and systems for power utility automation - Part 90-12: Wide area network engineering guidelines

Voting on this 202 page draft closes 2015-03-13

Wide area networks comprise in this context optical, radio, power line carrier, copper physical layers, with many topologies like rings, trees, and meshed networks, using different protocols (SDH, IP, MPLS, ...), data traffic (packet switching, TDM), and for a variety of applications (protection, SCADA, voice, video, …) for applications: between substations, between substations and control centers, and between control centers. One crucial aspect relates to protection data transmission via GOOSE, and the multicast data exchange of large amounts of sampled values (SV).

The list of normative references is quite long: some 150 documents are listed. Some examples are:

• IEEE 802.1ag, IEEE standards for local and metropolitan area network; Virtual Bridged Local Area Networks Amendment 5: Connectivity Fault Management)
• IEEE 802.1ah, IEEE standards for local and metropolitan area network; Provider Backbone Bridges
• IEEE 802.1Qay, Provider Backbone Bridge Traffic Engineering
• IEEE 802.1x, Port-based Network Access Control
• ITU-T G.0774-04: Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) - Management of the sub network connection protection for the network element view.
• RFC 3261, SIP: Session Initiation Protocol
• RFC 3376, Internet Group Management Protocol, Version 3

The list of abbreviations comprises some 300 terms from AAA (Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (security)) to ZBFW (Zone-Based Firewall).

The utilities all over have to get prepared for the huge amount of information to be shared on many different levels from switch gears all the way up to control centers … for many applications. You have to expect that the content of the IEC 61850-90-12 is a MUST reading for utility experts.

You could find a report that shows the importance of this part to a large utility:

Click HERE for a 200 page report: Faramarz Maghsoodlou and Jean Raymond, “Cisco and Hydro-Québec Use cases proposal for IEC 61850-90-12, August 2014.”

The DTR contains further implemented use cases.