A Low Latency Secure Communication Architecture for Microgrid Control

Aron Kondoro, Imed Ben Dhaou, Hannu Tenhunen and Nerey Mvungi
Additional contact information
Aron Kondoro: Department of Electronics and Embedded Systems, The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), 114 28 Stockholm, Sweden
Imed Ben Dhaou: Department of Computer Science, Hekma School of Engineering, Computing, and Informatics, Dar Al-Hekma University, Jeddah 22246-4872, Saudi Arabia
Hannu Tenhunen: Department of Electronics and Embedded Systems, The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), 114 28 Stockholm, Sweden
Nerey Mvungi: College of Information and Communication Technologies, University of Dar es Salaam, Dar es Salaam 14113, Tanzania

Energies, 2021, vol. 14, issue 19, 1-26

Abstract: The availability of secure, efficient, and reliable communication systems is critical for the successful deployment and operations of new power systems such as microgrids. These systems provide a platform for implementing intelligent and autonomous algorithms that improve the power control process. However, building a secure communication system for microgrid purposes that is also efficient and reliable remains a challenge. Conventional security mechanisms introduce extra processing steps that affect performance by increasing the latency of microgrid communication beyond acceptable limits. They also do not scale well and can impact the reliability of power operations as the size of a microgrid grows. This paper proposes a low latency secure communication architecture for control operations in an islanded IoT-based microgrid that solves these problems. The architecture provides a secure platform that optimises the standard CoAP/DTLS implementation to reduce communication latency. It also introduces a traffic scheduler component that uses a fixed priority preemptive algorithm to ensure reliability as the microgrid scales up. The architecture is implemented on a lab-scale IoT-based microgrid prototype to test for performance and security. Results show that the proposed architecture can mitigate the main security threats and provide security services necessary for power control operations with minimal latency performance. Compared to other implementations using existing secure IoT protocols, our secure architecture was the only one to satisfy and maintain the recommended latency requirements for power control operations, i.e., 100 ms under all conditions.

Keywords: secure communication; low latency communication; microgrid communication architecture; microgrid control (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/19/6262/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/19/6262/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:14:y:2021:i:19:p:6262-:d:648354

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().