Traffic of R-GOOSE and tunnelled GOOSE

Native IEC 61850 GOOSE (and Sampled Values) traffic, implemented as Layer‑2 multicast Ethernet frames, was originally designed for operation within Local Area Networks (LANs). Since these messages do not include Layer‑3 addressing information, they cannot be transported directly across Wide Area Networks (WANs), as their addressing semantics are only valid within the local Ethernet domain.

To overcome the limitations imposed by Layer‑2 confinement, including the lack of routability and direct interoperability with IP‑based wide‑area infrastructures, IEC 61850‑90‑5 introduced Routed‑GOOSE (R‑GOOSE) and Routed Sampled Values (R‑SV). By replacing the native Layer‑2 multicast transport with a UDP/IP multicast model, R‑GOOSE and R‑SV enable communication across Layer‑3 networks while remaining compatible with standard IP routing mechanisms.

An alternative approach for transporting these traffic flows between remote sites consists of encapsulating the original Ethernet frames through tunnelling technologies such as VXLAN, GRE, L2TPv3, or MPLS pseudowires combined with Ethernet bridging. In this case, the original GOOSE frame, including its multicast MAC addressing and timing characteristics, is preserved end‑to‑end, effectively extending the substation LAN across geographically separated locations.

The two approaches follow fundamentally different paradigms: whereas R‑GOOSE and R‑SV adapt the communication model to operate natively over wide‑area IP networks, tunnelling mechanisms preserve the original Layer‑2 communication behaviour by transparently extending the LAN across broader network domains.

This repository includes a set of tools to generate traffic for each of the options, also including .pcap traffic traces of each of them:
a) Native R-GOOSE.
b) Use of a multicast-to-unicast gateway to carry R-GOOSE over a unicast-only network.
c) R-GOOSE tunnelled in Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE).
d) Native GOOSE tunnelled in VXLAN.
e) Native GOOSE tunnelled in Simplemux blast flavour.