Mobile Secure Communications in Smart Grid Control

This paper analyses the communication required to connect the Distributed Energy Resources with power grid substations securely. The IEC 61850 standard communications enhanced with IEC 62351 security standard are evaluated by implementing the information exchanges related to voltage control in an experimental test bed deploying cellular M2M access networks. Particularly the end-to-end security is implemented using peer authentication and packet encryption in compliance with the IEC 62351-3 standard profile. Based on the network traces obtained from the test bed, the security overhead and the impact of cellular networks on transmission delay are measured by protocol specific performance indicators and the results are discussed in the paper.