An improved High-availability Seamless Redundancy (HSR) for dependable Substation Automation System

High-availability Seamless Redundancy (HSR) is an emerging standard that is suitable for mission-critical communication of IEC 61850 based Substation Automation System in smart grid, where the dependability is very important. This redundancy protocol provides zero recovery time by offering duplicated frames for separate physical paths, but it generates and circulates unnecessary traffic inside the network that will degrade the performance of the network and may cause the congestion, delay, or frame loss. To improve the HSR network performance, the main drawback of generating extra traffic should be considered and eliminated. This paper demonstrates comprehensive performance analysis of IEC 61850 based substation automation networks and applies the quick removing (QR) algorithm to improve the performance of the HSR network to overcome the major drawback. The performance analysis includes the HSR modules, i.e., Doubly Attached Node for HSR (DANH), Redundancy Box (RedBox), and Quadruple Box (QuadBox), and IEC 61850 services, i.e., Generic Object Oriented Substation Events (GOOSE), Sampled Measurement Values (SMV), and report service. Performance analysis was conducted to verify the timing constraints described in IEC 61850 as a reference for designing proper HSR network topology. The numerical results show that the frame loss, restricted in mission-critical network, occurs due to large amount of traffic volume, which is the main drawback of HSR. The QR algorithm improves the traffic performance of HSR by reducing the unnecessary traffic along with the decrease of packet loss significantly.