The continuously increasing demand for improvement in the substation-substation and substation-system level communications is forcing protection and control engineers to look for new ways to meet these requirements. The new data transfer land speed records show that the time for revolutionary Internet based power system applications is not that far in the future.
Using a modified version of TCP, a team consisting of members from the University of Tokyo, the WIDE Project, NTT Communications, and others accomplished both the Single Stream Class and the Multiple Stream Class records by transferring 585 gigabytes of data across 30,000 kilometers of network in about 30 minutes at an average rate of 9.08 gigabits per second.
The speed achieved using the standard TCP a day before has been 7.67Gbps.
The Internet2 Land Speed Record (I2-LSR) competition for the highest-bandwidth, end-to-end networks is an open and ongoing contest. The rules require that a data transfer must run for a minimum of 10 continuous minutes over a minimum terrestrial distance of 100 kilometers with a minimum of two router hops in each direction between the source node and the destination node. All data must be transferred end-to-end between a single pair of IP addresses by bona fide TCP/IP protocol using hardware and software available commercially or as an open source to members of the Internet2 community. In computing the amount of data transferred, only data transferred from user-process-space buffer(s) in the data-source network application and in the data-sink network application may be counted.
All data must be transferred in TCP packets encapsulated in IP packets that use no other IP addresses other than the designated source IP address and the designated destination IP address.
More details and updates on the competition are available at www.internet2.edu/lsr/
