International Conference on Communication and Signal Processing, April 6-8, 2017, India

Performance Evaluation of Smart Grid

Communication Network Using MPLS
S. PremKumar and V. Saminadan


Abstract — The power grid integrates multiprotocol label processed at the control center for real time monitoring of the
switching (MPLS) technologies into existing backbone grid. The data scanning rate, refreshment rate of the
communication networks present between substations and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system of a
control centers. MPLS is an emerging technology for smart grid power network is not prompt enough to provide adequate
communication networks. MPLS uses labels to identify the information about the state of a power network in real-time
packets. This paper proposes path protection using MPLS traffic and dynamic manner. The latency required for the continuous
engineering for IEEE 30 bus system communication network for
smart grid. Resiliency is achieved by means of end-to-end
monitoring of the power system data is less than 20msec. Baki
restoration capabilities that enable the network to reroute the [2] suggested a continuous monitoring of smart grid devices
path around a failure. The proposed approach is validated using through MPLS network with minimum delay. Kansal et al [3]
OPNET. developed a model to determine the parameters to simulate a
communications system for a power grid starting from the
Index Terms—Multi Protocol Label Switching, Internet power network configuration and measurement of data. Lin et
Protocol, Traffic Engineering, Smart Grid al [4] proposes a power/network co-simulation which
integrates power system dynamic simulator and network
I. INTRODUCTION simulator together using synchronization mechanism.
However, the resulting throughput, packet loss rate and round
trip time is comparable to that of an open flow network where

T
he present electric grid which was established in the flows do not expire or MPLS low bandwidth network with
beginning of 19th century is one of the multiform similar traffic demands [5].
system created at all times. This system contains
transmission cable, circuit breakers, feeders, fuse etc
mounted together in an integrated manner with
communication enabled. During the later part of nineteenth
century the power grid system puts computer and sensors to
monitor and control the grid. In the past decade these sensors
are replaced with intelligent electronic devices designed
exclusively for effective monitoring and control of the power
grid. Hence, smart grid was introduced with aim of
overcoming the weakness of conventional electric grid by
using smart grid based intelligent electronic devices.
The smart grid model improves quick and real time
monitoring with advanced control of the power system
equipment present at far of locations thereby improving
system reliability and quality of service. However it seems
these are all not possible without considering the key role of
communication technology. Existing power system network
infrastructure does not have continuous and centralized
monitoring of power system devices which are present at
various substations. The present data available has more delay
and hence it is not possible to provide real time situational
awareness of the power grid network [1].
Multi-Protocol Label Switching based data communication Fig. 1. Smart Grid Network
network provides minimum latency for the data that are to be

S.Premkumar, Research Scholar is with the Pondicherry Engineering College,

Pondicherry, India.(e-mail:erprems@gmail.com). Based on the theoretical study it was concluded that MPLS
V.Saminadan is a Professor in the Department of ECE, Pondicherry has considerable advantages over traditional IP networks. In
Engineering College, Pondicherry, (e-mail: saminadan@pec.edu). this work MPLS with traffic engineering is proposed to reduce

978-1-5090-3800-8/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE

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delay and avoid congestion. This paper is organized as MPLS provides higher speed, bandwidth, reliability and repair
follows: Section II points out the optimal placement of phasor potentials to meet the growing data and two-way
measurement units (PMUs) and the backbone data communications needs of today’s smart grid power
communication network requirements for wide area distribution systems. IP network cannot determine a route that
monitoring using MPLS technology. Section III presents the a specific data packet will take when it is sent across the
proposed communication network model based on the MPLS network. It also cannot determine the amount of time it will
standard which can be used for the smart grid applications. take to get to its destination. IP network is not sufficient for
The MPLS based smart grid communication network is utilities that require mission-critical operations of traffic.
modeled in opnet and the performance parameters are However, IP over an MPLS network can solve the problems.
analyzed in Section IV. Finally, the paper is concluded in
Section V. MPLS is an efficient packet forwarding mechanism with
potentialities of data link layer and network layer. It transports
II. SMART GRID MODELING REQUIREMENTS data from nodes present in one network to another network by
using labels instead of IP based addressing. MPLS uses labels
to identify the path of packets that should traverse through the
A. Numerical Observation Analysis (NOA)
network. Some of the protocols that are used in MPLS are
open short path first protocol (OSPF), Resource reservation
A power system needs complete observation of the network protocol (RSVP) and border gateway protocol (BGP). It
state estimation to have complete observability. Hence, the combines the advantages of IP routing and simplicity of label
power system observability can be performed using NOA by switching. MPLS is not a alternate for the IP based data
placing PMU’s in all the buses and sequentially eliminating communication but it is an expansion for IP architecture by
from different buses one by one and stopped when the including dynamic functionalities and applications. The
measurement sets obtained from the remaining PMU’s can primary functionality of the MPLS is attaching short fixed-
make the system completely observable. labels to the packets that enter into MPLS domain. The typical
Components of of MPLS network are customer edge (CE),
B.PMU Placement problem formulation label edge router (LER) and label switching router (LER). The
CE puts the data into IP packets and sends to the ingress LER.
The optimal PMU placement for an N bus system is The LSR acts as a transit switch in the MPLS backbone
formulated as follows network. The labeled IP packets are received through the
appropriate LSPs and finally sent to the egress LER. MPLS
label is a short fixed entity with no special structure. Label is
N
Min¦ ci p i
placed between layer2 (Data Link Layer) and layer3 (Network
Layer) of the packet to form Layer 2.5 label switched network
i 1
on layer 2 switching functionality without layer 3 IP routing.
MPLS is an evolving technology for high performance packet
S.t F (C ) t b control and forwarding mechanism for routing the packets in
the data networks. MPLS has developed into a salient
where, c is the binary decision variable vector for PMU technology for efficiently operating and managing IP networks
placement, whose entries are defined as because of its efficient functionalities in providing traffic
engineering (TE) [7].

­1 if PMU is placed at i th bus D. Traffic Engineering (TE)

pi ®
¯0 otherwise Traffic Engineering (TE) is a mechanism by which the
communication resources can be controlled (such as automatic
bandwidth adjustments for traffic engineering tunnel relative
b is an unit vector of length N, i.e b=[1 1 1…] T.
to the need) within the networks without affecting the quality
of service. The key features of TE are resource reservation and
ci is the cost of PMU installed at ith bus. optimal resource utilization. To balance the load on different
links, routers, and switches in the network are enabled with
F(C) is the observability constraint vector function, whose TE by providing an alternate path in case of link failure or
entries are non-zero otherwise. If the corresponding individual congestion. The key function of Traffic Engineering is to
buses are observable with respect to a given measurement set create economical and reliable IP network operations without
and zero otherwise [6]. compromising the network performance. MPLS networks use
TE mechanisms to reduce network congestion and reroute the
C. Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) traffic if any node or link fails in the network
and additionally improve the network performance. TE
modifies routing patterns to provide efficient mapping over
A smart grid running on a converged communications traffic flows to network resources. The efficient mapping will
network architecture utilizing internet protocol (IP) and multi- scale the incidence of congestion and play an important role
protocol label switching (MPLS) can support all services. The

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within the implementation of network services with secure
quality of services (QoS) [8].
2 3 PMU2
PMU1
III. PROPOSED SMART GRID COMMUNICATION 1
NETWORK MODEL
1
1
For the analysis of different communication architecture in 4
PMU3 14
real -time various tools such as G5
NS2,GNS3,OMNET++,OPNET etc are available in the
markets nowadays. The proposed communication network for PMU4
7 6
the IEEE 30 bus system is modeled and analyzed using 9 10
OPNET.
15
A.MPLS Smart Grid Scenario G8
The IEEE 30 bus systems’ communication network consist G11
of 30 nodes(routers) that are internetworked to each other by 23
SONET OC3 cable, of these 30 nodes 7 nodes are placed in PMU5 16
the substations. The substations which are equipped with
18
PMUs are 2,3,10,12,18,24 and 30 in the IEEE 30 bus system. 17
Fig. 2 shows optimal placement of PMUs in the IEEE 30bus 20 PMU6
system. The 7 routers which are placed in the optimal position 21
19 24
of the IEEE 30 bus system will be considered as a subnet. 28 27 22
Each of these nodes is considered as a sub network.
Configuration of dynamic LSP between LER_1, LSR1, LSR2, 25
LER_2 using the MPLS_E-LSP_DYNAMIC link, Create a
bidirectional route from LER_1 to LER__2. LER1 is the
substation edge router and LER2 is the control center edge PMU7 29 26
router, LER1 is connected to regional substation1 LSR, using 30
SONET OC3 link. Similarly LER2 is connected to regional
substation2 LSR, using SONET OC3 link. And then connect Fig. 2 Optimal PMU placement of IEEE 30 bus system
the LER1 to LER2, using DYNAMIC LSP. Similarly
Configure a DYNAMIC LSP between LER_2, LSR2, LSR1,
and LER_1, create LSP path same as above but from LER_2
towards LER_1 on the top path. All the data from the PDCs
will be collected by the super phasor data concentrator
(SPDC) which is connected to the core edge router of the
control center.
B. Substation Scenario
The smart grid communication architecture consists of six
substation. Each of the substations are equipped with various
teleprotection devices, PMUs and IEDs that are connected to
the substation router by using 100 Base-T links. Fig.3 shows
that the network simulation model of proposed substation
scenario. We have assumed the core edge routers are placed in
the substations equipped with phasor measurement unit. These
data collected from these PMUs are transmitted through the
backbone communication network to the phasor data
concentrator and finally to the control center.
The proposed MPLS based communication network provides
low latency end to end delays to have efficient monitoring of
the power network. MPLS-TE tunnels provide alternate paths
in case of link failures in the communication network. The
networks without tunnel have more delays compared to
networks with tunnels. By providing efficient communication
network topology the real time data required for stable
monitoring will be useful to enhance the operation of the grid. Fig. 3 Substation Scenario
The control center (CC) for this power system network will be
chosen such all the distance between the CC and PMU located
substations are minimum.

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 IV. SIMULATION RESULTS
Implementing MPLS with TE minimizes the congestion in
the network and provides the better utilizations of network
links. MPLS suffers minimum delay and provides high
throughput. It is understood that the timeframe in which the
links are made to fail shows there is heavy loss of traffic in the
case where there is no MPLS-TE Technique used in the
network. Where there is an implementation of MPLS-TE
Mechanism using N Hop there is great increase in the
performance of the network and the performance metric in the
study is the traffic received. The comparison graph of Path
Protection in the network is shown below. The graph shows
the comparison of the network performance in the case of
node or link failure in the network with MPLS-TE and without
MPLS-TE.
Fig 4 shows that LSP delay of primary path and Fig. 5
shows that the LSP traffic sent and traffic received of primary
path. Fig.6 shows that LSP delay of backup path which is
maximum delay when compared to primary path of LSP Fig. 5 Primary LSP traffic sent and received
delay, and Fig 7 shows that the traffic sent and traffic received
for backup LSP. The traffic received from LSP is deceased.
Here there is heavy loss of traffic where there is no MPLS
traffic engineering technique is used in the network. The
network has same traffic sent and traffic received in the LSP
router due to MPLS-TE which is shown in Fig.8 and Fig.9
shows that the LSP traffic reroute time. Fig.10 shows that the
LSP delay of backup path with MPLS-TE which has minimum
delay when reroute the traffic. When there is any failure on the
network the LSP reroute the traffic with minimum time.

Fig. 6 Backup LSP delay without TE

Fig. 4 Primary LSP delay

Fig. 7 Backup LSP traffic sent and received without TE

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 V. CONCLUSION
In this paper the performance of IEEE 30 bus systems’
communication network using MPLS technology were
analyzed. The result obtained shows that the use of MPLS
architecture in SG communication offers a range of additional
benefits and improvement. Path protection using MPLS-TE in
Smart Grid is proposed. The link failures in the
communication path can be recovered by means of path
protection using MPLS-TE. The fault notification sent by the
corresponding router before the failed link is responsible for
rerouting the traffic and sends the packets which are unable to
reach the destination. Any failure at any point along the path
of a circuit will cause the end nodes to move the traffic from a
new route. A backup LSP is established, in advance to provide
failure protection for the protected LSPs that is carrying
network traffic. Hence the simulation results show an
appropriate end to end delay, traffic sent and received and the
Fig. 8 Backup LSP Reroute time with TE reroute time of network traffics in failure situations. The
simulation proves that the delay is reduced and has very
minimum time when reroute the traffic using MPLS traffic
engineering.

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Fig. 10 Backup LSP traffic sent and received with TE

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