Network-Simulation-Based Evaluation of Smart Grid Applications
The United States and many other countries are conducting a major upgrade of their electrical grids. The new “smart grid” is not a physically isolated network like the older power grid was, but a complicated network of networks. That greatly increases the security concerns, ranging from hackers who gain access to control networks or create denial-of-service attacks on the networks themselves, to accidental causes, such as natural disasters or operator errors. Therefore, it is critical to build a safe, resilient and secure communication environment for protecting the smart grid. Under this central theme, our research work has two strongly correlated streams. First, to analyze large-scale networked systems (e.g., smart grid communication networks) with high fidelity, it is necessary for a testing system to offer both effective emulation (to represent critical software execution) and realistic simulation (to model background computation and communication). We have developed a network testbed using both parallel simulation and virtual- machine-based, virtual-time-embedded emulation to provide both functional and temporal fidelity for running large-scale networking experiments, so that technologies can be appropriately evaluated with modeling and simulation methodologies as well as with real software/hardware testing before they are integrated into the grid. Second, we have utilized the testbed to study various cyber attacks in the smart grid, including a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) in an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and an event buffer flooding attack on a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system (both for the Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIPG) Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), and also used it to evaluate a demand response design in a hierarchical transactive control network (as part of the Pacific Northwest smart grid demonstration project).
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