Using Internet Protocols to Implement IEC 60870-5 Telecontrol Functions

Abstract

The telecommunication networks of telecontrol systems in electric utilities have undergone an innovation process. This has removed many of their technical restrictions and made it possible to consider carrying out telecontrol tasks with general standard protocols instead of the specific ones that are used currently. These are defined in the standards 60870-5, 60870-6, and 61850 from the International Electrotechnical Commission, among others. This paper is about the implementation, using the services of general standard protocols, of the telecontrol application functions defined by the standard IEC 60870-5-104. The general protocols used to carry out telecontrol tasks are those used in the Internet: the telecommunication network-management protocol SNMPv3 (simple network management protocol version 3), the clock synchronization protocol network time protocol and Secure SHell. With this new implementation, we have achieved, among others, two important aims: 1) to improve performance and, above all, 2) to solve the serious security problems present in the telecontrol protocols currently being used. These problems were presented by IEEE in an article published in the website of the IEEE Standards Association. In this paper, the use of general standard protocols to perform the telecontrol of electrical networks is justified. The development of this paper—its achievements and conclusions and the tools used—is detailed.