A distance relay scheme is commonly used for backup protection. This scheme, called a step distance protection, is comprised of 3 steps for graded zones having different operating time. As for the conventional step distance protection scheme, Zone 2 can exceed the ordinary coverage excessively in case of a transformer protection relay especially. In this case, there can be overlapped protection area from a backup protection relay and, therefore, malfunctions can occur when any fault occurs in the overlapped protection area. Distance relays and overcurrent relays are used for backup protection generally, and both relays have normally this problem, the maloperation, caused by a fault in the overlapped protection area. Corresponding to an IEEE standard, this problem can be solved with the modification of the operating time. On the other hand, in Korea, zones are modified to cope with this problem in some specific conditions. These two methods may not be obvious to handle this problem correctly because these methods, modifying the common rules, can cause another coordination problem. To overcome this problem clearly, this paper describes an improved backup protection coordination scheme using an IEC 61850-based distance relay for transformer backup protection. IEC 61850-based IED(Intelligent Electronic Device) and the network system based on the kernel 2.6 LINUX are realized to verify the proposed method. And laboratory tests to estimate the communication time show that the proposed coordination method is reliable enough for the improved backup protection scheme.