A secure and distributed control network for the communications in smart grid

The security of the control network has become a major concern since the wide deployment of smart grid systems. The functions of Intelligent Energy Management (IEM) highly depend on the communication techniques. The IEM is the service agent of smart grid communication network in a limited management zone for distributed and autonomous power system control and operations. In such a smart grid, the power flows are unpredictable. Therefore, the management nodes, i.e., IEM agents, form a communication network that has no fixed infrastructure. For this reason, the IEM network can be considered as an ad-hoc network. In this paper, the newly proposed TQOS (Trustworthiness-based Quality of Service) routing protocol is adopted to ensure that every power system communication session can be established through a secure route [1]. We calculate the performance cost of using certain encryption algorithm for building a secure route. By using Opnet simulator, we find the overall smart grid communication performance under different network conditions, by changing the network scales, packet generation size and rate, and the node processing capability. Our simulation results have demonstrated that the proposed secure and distributed network architecture can be applied to smart grid communications in practice.