The Emergence of the “Smart Grid” The power grid of the near future must be an intelligent, self-healing,
real-time system i.e. a “Smart Grid”
What is a Smart Grid?
The integration of communications networks with the power grid in order to create an electricity-communications superhighway capable of monitoring its own health at all times, alerting officials immediately when problems arise and automatically taking corrective actions that enable the grid to fail gracefully and prevent a local failure from cascading out of control, as happened August 14, 2003
(The Great Northeast Blackout).
How RuggedCom is Helping to Enable the Smart Grid
RuggedCom has developed communications products and technologies specifically designed to
operate reliably in harsh environments such as those found in electric utility substations. RuggedCom’s substation hardened Ethernet switches (RuggedSwitch™) are the choice of electric utilities around
the world for implementing reliable substation LANs (local area networks) for intra-substation communications used in mission critical applications including power system protection and control. RuggedCom’s substation hardened cyber security appliances (RuggedRouter™) provides protection against cyber attack of the Smart Grid and a secure method for implementing inter-substation communications across the Smart Grid using a variety of media and technologies. RuggedCom products are designed to provide the communications backbone of the Smart Grid.
The full product basket of communications networking technologies offered by RuggedCom enables
a complete communications backbone solution for the smart grid.
The RuggedSwitch™ family of Ethernet Switch products offer such industry leading features as:
Zero-Packet-Loss technology for error free operation under severe EMI (electromagnetic interference)conditions. They also qualify as an IEEE 1613 Class 2 error free device for
substation applications.
High speed network fault recovery with eRSTP (enhanced Rapid Spanning Tree) offering
sub 5ms speeds.
Wide operating temperature range (-40 to +85C) without the use of fans.
Maximizing network availability with dual redundant parallel load-sharing power supplies that can be powered from different power sources (eg. ac source and station battery)
Support for short-haul fiber optical media for intra-substation networking and long-haul fiber
optical mediafor high-speed (1000Mbps) inter-substation communications using native Ethernet up to 90km per hop.
Network level security features for NERC CIP compliance
The RuggedRouter™ family of Ethernet Routers products offers key inter-substation communication features such as:
Electronic security perimeter protection using the integrated routing, firewall, and virtual private
network features
Multiple wide area network interconnectivity options such as T1/E1, DSL, DDS, dial-in modem
and long haul fiber support
Cyber security features necessary for NERC CIP compliance
The RuggedServer™ Serial Device Servers and RuggedMC™ Media Converter family of products round out the complete network infrastructure product basket:
Connect legacy serial devices to the Ethernet network, effectively making these
devices “IP Enabled”
Use serial servers and media converters to maximize utilization of installed devices
Leverage existing infrastructure to reduce capital costs for new hardware.
Utility specific serial protocol support including DNP 3.0 and Modbus
In addition to the above features, all RuggedCom products are designed for Mean Time Between Failures (MTBFs) greater than 500,000hrs and network availability greater than 99.999%.These products and features make RuggedCom the ideal choice as the network infrastructure provider for the communications backbone of the Smart Grid
