A Local Area Network for an Electrical Substation

Increasing progress towards the automation of electric substations leads to the requirement for digital communications between electronic transducers, digital protective relays, and other elements of the automated substation. The point-to-point wiring schemes conventionally used for analog signal transfer in substations are not suitable for high speed data transmission with high noise immunity. This paper describes a type of data communications network or local area network suitable for this application. Numerical results are obtained of network performance for a typical substation and of the variation of network performance with substation size.