**1. Introduction**

The electrical grid systems have grown rapidly and rise complicity. This growing mainly based on the increasing of the decentralized renewable energy sources connection and communication between their different components. Numerous studies have been conducted to identify how these components are communicate to support power grid monitoring control and protection functions, based on its real-time operation [1]. In this context, some studies focus on the standardization of the power grid communication systems based on the IEC 61850 standard and its communication protocols implementation.

The latter brings new challenges in determining the reliability and the performance of the IEDs when having to consider both power system and communication phenomena within the multivendor environment [2]. The reliability of IED protection function that ensures a particular disturbance will disconnect as fast enough from the healthy network to mitigate the effect of the fault is directly related to the reliability of the power grid. Thus due to the vital role IED play to achieve assigned requirements and reduce the financial losses, the risk for malfunctioning should be minimized. It is therefore, performance testing, verifying and validating for the monitoring, control and protection functions settings within the assigned requirements is important. Since IEC 61850 standard has been distributed the protection, functions in different logical node (LN) that may located in different logical devices (LD) or even in different IED. The assigned LNs need to communicate and operate successfully in order to execute the relay protection functions reliably. Traditionally, manufacturer engineers make use of standalone relay performance testing. While also it is always necessary to certify its proper functioning during commissioning, and after a certain time of service. These testing make the relay to interface to different voltages and currents sources subjected to different electrical system circumstances.

During normal electrical network operation, protection relays are naturally inactive. Relays malfunction can only detected when the electrical network in faulted condition. With the advent of digital simulators the productivity of the expert engineers are increased and can save more time. Allowing them to execute the electrical system model in real time with different circumstances and faulted conditions, meanwhile protection relay interfaced to the digital simulator as hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) to evaluate their performance. In addition, GOOSE possibilities for transmission of different kind of data offers new opportunities for upgrading relay protection functions themselves and their testing. However utilization of the IEC 61850 protocols (GOOSE, SV, MMS) add more challenges and extra requirements for protection relay confirmation about the IEC 61850 capabilities.

IEC 61850 is the enabler for the SAS automation that offers different popular SAS protocols, GOOSE, SV for intra-substation within the first version and R-GOOSE, R-SV for inter-substations within the second version over the communication medium. SAS monitoring control and protection parameters parameter can be modelled, configured and automated using the IEC 61850 Logical nodes LNs that might located in to different logical devices LDs within different IEDs. On the other hand, In [3–8] recent works raise the concept that although IEC 61850 offer many benefits for the SAS but the configuration and implementation of the IEC 61850 standard is the major challenges facing the configuration and implementation engineers according to the existing configuration tools (IED, System) within a multivendor environment.

Moreover, manufacturers support is always needed along with the commission of the multivendor IEDs project based on system support knowledge and tools. At this point, working in such multivendor project can be consider as much costly and time-consuming. However, in terms of accelerating and relaxing the standard configuration and implementations along with the rapidly IEC 61850 standard developments, a Light-Weight version can be used. These IEC 61850 Light-Weight version according to different open source libraries offer various solutions based C and Java etc. The offered solutions are worked based on low-level machine code required for the IEC 61850 implementation are automatically generated. The solutions can be implemented within different operating systems environments such as Linux, Windows, and macOS. Doing so will accelerate the development of the industrial instrument product line. Since the IEC standards are developed rapidly and usually the new/updated standards will cover/support new aspects related to the smart digital systems operation based monitoring control and protection functions. In this regard, developments industrial product lines usually took long time to support the developed new features defined based on the new/updated standards. Whereas, the Light-weight defined solution defined here helping to reduce the overhead standard complex information, limit ambiguity and accelerates the developments and testing tasks by supporting the new/updated aspects that defined based on the new/updated versions of the IEC standards. In [9–11] development and implementation of the new IEC 61850–90-5 R-GOOSE and R-SV protocols and their security standards IEC 62351 had been analyzed by using different developed source codes and tools. On other hand, the development of the smart grid controller

#### *Advanced Communication and Control Methods for Future Smart Grid DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96596*

based a commercial controller e.g. CompactRIO systems. However it provides a high-performance processing capabilities, sensor-specific conditioned I/O, and a closely integrated software toolchain that make them ideal for Industrial, monitoring, and control applications, but the user will be limited with the predefined control blocks afford with the initiated library, and with the supported interfaces/ protocols by the controller. Whereas, the designed Light-Weight controller is more flexible and expandable in a way that able to support any state-of-the-art protocols/ technologies and new/update monitoring, control and protection functions that might be defined along with the new/updating IEC standards. In [12–14] Controller development based on the Light-Weight designed controller for monitoring and managing of the reactive power flow between DSO and TSO networks was analyzed and tested, comprising between different controller that had been utilized in different boards was made.

In this work, embedded (Linux) environment is used based on microcontroller and SoC FPGA kit, since they are considering as a cost effective and flexible configuration.

In this work, different protection IEDs based Light-weight IEC 61850 are designed and demonstrated applying FPGA and microcontroller through the available of different open source software libraries. Performance testing for the designed Light-weight IEDs and the different conventional protection IEDs such as (Vamp52, ABB REF615) are validated by the RT-HIL laboratory setup as illustrated in **Figure 1**. Round-trip IEC 61850 GOOSE message latency measurements are made for those different IEDs. For RT-HIL testing, the test case study is modeled in MATLAB/Simulink and executed in real-time using Opal-RT's eMEGAsim software and running in to the Opal real-time simulator. Finally, the performance of both Light-weight and different protection IEDs based GOOSE round tripping latencies are compared and evaluated.
