A Testbed for Smart Grid Communications over the Internet

In this paper, we present a testbed for smart grid communications over the Internet and investigate the influence of communication latency and the selection of protocols on the operation of the smart grid. The simulations are based on the open-source discrete event simulator OMNeT++ and the INET framework. Although the INET framework includes most protocols used on the Internet, the implementation of some of the standards, including the open shortest path first (OSPF) and the border gateway protocol (BGP), is incomplete and may cause problems in some network topologies. We fixed this issue by implementing the missing part of cases defined in the standard. The hardware-in-the-loop simulation technique will be employed to test the communication performance between the control center and phasor measurement units (PMUs) over the simulated network.