Integrating IoT with IEC 61850

Internet of Things continues to be one of the key technology trends in the recent years. According to Gartner’s estimations, IoT network will grow from 8,7 billion in 2017 to over 20 billion connected things by 2020. Utilities representing the energy market understand the advantages offered by Internet of Things, and look towards integrating it with its Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) deployed in substations and distribution networks. Well-thought integration of the IoT with existing smart-grids will extend benefits beyond distribution, automation and monitoring, making energy use more efficient and saving billions of Euros…

In this blog entry, I will showcase how to integrate IEC 61850 (an international standard for smart grids and substation automation) with an MQTT based IoT network. The idea and demo setup of the system have been presented by JPEmbedded at the IEC 61850 Global Conference in Berlin in October 2018.

JPEmbedded’s IoT to IEC 61850 demo setup consists of several NanoPi modules, acting as IoT devices installed on Distributed Energy Resources (e.g. on microturbines or, on photovoltaics). Each IoT device publishes some data which is sent to an MQTT broker running on a RaspberryPi device.

The MQTT broker is responsible for receiving all messages broadcasted by the IoT network, filtering them, determining who is subscribed to each message, and sending the message to these subscribed clients. Another responsibility of the broker is the authentication and authorization of clients. The broker can handle a large number of concurrently connected MQTT clients.

In our system, a JPEmbedded’s IEC 61850 gateway is configured as an MQTT client and subscribed to receive relevant data from the MQTT broker. The values received from the broker are mapped to the IEC 61850 data model. The control block configured on the gateway generates GOOSE frames each time any value is updated by the IoT network. According to our measurement, the delay between reception of an MQTT message and generation of a goose message by the gateway is lower than 0,8 milisecons.

Updates on the parameter in the data model are sent to the IEC 61850 client installed on a PC.

Communication between DER (including dispersed generation devices and dispersed storage devices) and IEC 61850 is already defined in IEC 61850-7-420:2009. It utilizes existing IEC logical nodes defined in part 4 of the standard where possible, but also defines DER-specific logical nodes where needed.

As far as the hardware is concerned, NanoPi and RaspberryPi are only two examples of the various platforms that can be used as a base for IoT devices. Similar systems can be made on any other, commercially available IoT device by integrating it with JPEmbedded’s IEC 61850 gateway. Finally, JPEmbedded’s gateway can be customized and convert not only MQTT, but also other data protocols  like CoAP, Websocket, Node or XMPP.

If you would like to know more about our demo system or the IEC 61850 gateway itself, please contact us at sales@jpembedded.eu.