IEC TR 61850-90-4:2013 PDF

Overview

IEC/TR 61850-90-4:2013 - “Network engineering guidelines” - is a technical report in the IEC 61850 family that gives practical guidance for engineering local area networks specifically for substation automation. It is aimed at readers familiar with network communications and IEC 61850 concepts, such as substation protection and control equipment vendors, network equipment vendors, and system integrators. The report focuses on topology, redundancy, clock synchronization, multicast transport of sampled values, and other critical aspects that affect protection, control and the process-bus concept.

Key topics and technical requirements

• Network design checklist and engineering flow: guidance on principles, environmental and EMI considerations, physical media, form factor, testing, and maintainability.
• Ethernet for substations: recommended subsets, physical layer choices (copper/optical) and full-duplex operation considerations.
• Traffic classes and IEC 61850 protocols: treatment of MMS, GOOSE, and SV (Sampled Values) traffic and their engineering implications.
• Multicast transport and sampled values: handling large-volume multicast SV from merging units, multicast domains and filtering to avoid trunk congestion.
• Redundancy and dependability: approaches to network redundancy, recovery time, availability, and risk analysis relevant to protection-related tripping over the network.
• Latency and performance: budgeting for different traffic types, hop counts, bridge delays and engineering networks to meet protection timing requirements (station and process bus).
• Traffic control mechanisms: VLANs, multicast filtering, trunk traffic reduction, and configuration practices to retain priorities and limit unnecessary traffic.
• Time synchronization: high-precision clock synchronization requirements and synchronization mechanisms central to the process bus.
• Addressing, management and security: IP addressing plans for substations, device addressing (including PRP-capable devices), network management, supervision, scalability and cyber-security considerations.

Applications and who uses it

• Network designers and architects engineering station bus and process bus networks in substations.
• IED (Intelligent Electronic Device) vendors and merging unit manufacturers implementing SV and GOOSE transport strategies.
• System integrators and utility engineers responsible for protection coordination where network transport affects tripping decisions.
• Network equipment vendors building switches and bridges intended for utility automation environments.

Related standards

• IEC/TR 61850-90-4 complements the broader IEC 61850 suite (for example IEC 61850-5 on design/engineering principles) and should be used alongside device and process-bus specific parts of IEC 61850 when planning substation networks.

Keywords: IEC 61850, IEC/TR 61850-90-4, substation automation, network engineering guidelines, process bus, GOOSE, SV, sampled values, multicast, VLAN, redundancy, clock synchronization, PRP, network topology.