Modeling and simulation of the communication networks in Smart grid

A reliable and secure communication network plays a significant role in Smart grid systems, which aims at coordinating generation, transmission, distribution, and consumption parts in power system. The scope of our work ranges from utility level to end consumption level. The major difficulties in this work can be summarized as follows: 1) Performance requirements from the viewpoint of network have not been clearly defined; 2) Model mapping from power system to communication networks is not straightforward. 3) Network performance has not been well-investigated. This paper proposes a communication network model for a typical program of smart gird. Moreover, application requirements, link capacity and traffic settings have been investigated. Simulation results validate the feasibility of this model and provide useful network performances which can satisfy both the non-real-time and real-time application requirements.