1 Scope

This part of IEC 62357, which is a Technical Report, applies to information exchange in power systems including, but not restricted to, substations, control centre, maintenance centre, energy management systems, synchrophasor-based grid stability systems, bulk energy generation (including fossil fuel plants), distributed energy generation (renewables, wind and solar), energy storage, load management (demand side management and demand response for distribution level consumers or producers).

This Technical Report addresses the issues encountered when migrating from Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) to the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). It describes migration strategies, covering impact on applications, communication stack, network nodes, configuration, address allocation, cyber security and the related management.

This Technical Report considers backward compatibility and show concepts as well as necessary migration paths to IPv6 from IPv4 where necessary, for a number of protocols in the IEC 61850 framework.

Following a review of IEC standards and technical reports according to the reference architecture for power system information exchange (IEC 62357‑1), this Technical Report supports modifications caused by the introduction of IPv6 for revision of these documents, considering the impact of permitting or requiring IPv6.

This  Technical  Report  does  not  impose  the  use  of  the  IPv6  technology  in  utility communications.