Substation automation systems are characterised by a high degree of functional integration, which can lead to a centralised substation protection and control (CPC) architecture. Most CPC architectures utilise merging units to interface with current and voltage transformers, which causes a high-communication load on the process bus in case of large substations. This study proposes a CPC architecture based on distributed signal processing units (DSPUs) to overcome those drawbacks by publishing the results of the signal processing algorithms directly. The reduction of the communication load through the usage of DSPUs has been shown in a case study, which uses a 16-bay transmission substation topology as a reference.