In past years, the growing complexity of the electrical system and the rise in the number of Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) have increased the data network management complexity in power substations. A pressing need to improve the reliability of such environments has pushed energy companies to increase the investment in the operation of their communication networks. This paper proposes to use the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm into the communication networks of power substations to implement novel redundancy techniques based on redundant multicast trees, in order to replace the traditional redundancy mechanisms in power substation communication networks resulting in capital and operational costs reduction. We apply pre-planned protection based on redundant trees and formulate an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model to provide redundant multicast trees in the network trying to minimize the number of used network links. Redundant trees transmit duplicate traffic under the same underlying LAN in isolation, to guarantee zero recovery time and improve the use of network resources. Simulation results show that our approach achieves the same performance as traditional redundancy mechanisms using half of the network resources (i.e., compared against the Parallel Redundancy Protocol, PRP).

在过去的几年中，电气系统的复杂性不断增加，而智能电子设备（IED）的数量也在增加，变电站的数据网络管理复杂性也随之增加。迫切需要提高这种环境的可靠性，这迫使能源公司增加了其通信网络运营方面的投资。本文提议将软件定义网络（SDN）范例应用于变电站的通信网络中，以基于冗余多播树实现新颖的冗余技术，以取代变电站通信网络中的传统冗余机制，从而导致资金和运营成本减少。我们基于冗余树应用预先计划的保护，并制定一个整数线性规划（ILP）模型以在网络中提供冗余多播树，以尽量减少使用的网络链路数量。冗余树隔离地在同一基础LAN下传输重复流量，以确保零恢复时间并改善网络资源的使用。仿真结果表明，我们的方法使用一半的网络资源即可实现与传统冗余机制相同的性能（即，与并行冗余协议PRP相比）。