Efficient and reliable communication methods are fundamental to promote wide-area protection of communication services and power security,at present, the research on real-time and reliability of existing wide-area protection system communication is still insufficient.To solve this problem, based on the existing wide-area protection research, this paper studies the communication network construction of hierarchical wide-area protection system of smart grid, and divides the wide-area protection system into smart substations as nodes.The protection control of smart grid takes the real-time data of wide-area measurement as the research object, and simulates and analyses the network performance of the hierarchical protection system of smart grid,the research work provides reference and reference for the development of smart grid in China.