Abstract
Virtualization technology is knocking at the door of the power industry after proving its utility in the field of computer and communication technology. Pilot projects and some early research works have shown its potential. However, power systems are critical infrastructure and require a rigorous examination before deploying any new technology. One of the most stringent requirements for a protection operation is its fault clearance time. Different research studies cited different results, which merits further investigation. Therefore, in this work, a testbed was developed with a commercial Virtual Protection Automation and Control (VPAC) product and two physical Intelligent Electronic Devices (pIEDs) products. To investigate more about network layer performance and as a proof-of-concept, an indigenous Virtual Protection Relay (VPR) has been developed and deployed on the same server hosting VPAC. The testing began by performing a real-time performance test, then Generic Object Oriented Substation Event (GOOSE) Round Trip Time (RTT) and protection operation tests were carried out without and under substation-characterized network traffic. Afterwards, leveraging the in-house VPR, the performance of the Docker network layer was explored with Host, Media Access Control VLAN (MAC-vlan), and Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK)-based technologies, where the DPDK technology proved to be capable of faster packet processing. Finally, systematic experiments demonstrated the importance of network and resource management together with the utility of Single Root IO Virtualization (SR-IOV) technology.