The IEC 61850 defines two high-speed Ethernet network buses, the station bus and process bus. The process bus implementation requires high network speed of 100 Mbps or 1000 Mbps. Optical CT’s and PT’s with high speed processing and accuracy on an Optical Ethernet will bring about very high speed sampling data on the network, and thus makes it possible for IED’s to have sampled values from the network rather than from hardwired interfaces. At the station bus also Optical Ethernet is preferred at 100 Mbps speed. This conceptually takes away the entire field wiring at the Process level to IEDs out and thereby making your overall sub-station wiring simpler. The bus architecture at high speeds enables multi-casting, thereby enabling multiple IEDs to process the same data if required.

At the station level, the bus architecture enables peer-to-peer communication and distributed decision-making. Also the IEC 61850 engineering conceptualizes a common XML based object driven configuration mechanism, a layered communication architecture on top of MMS services and well defined conformance specifications. These definitions thus enable the IEC 61850 standard to achieve long term cost benefits to utilities in terms of lowered engineering and commissioning costs and simpler architecture makes maintenance costs that much lower.