Dependability and Resource Optimation Analysis for Smart Grid Communication Networks

Smart Grid is the trend of next generation power distribution and network management that enable a two -- way interactive communication and operation between consumers and suppliers, so as to achieve intelligent resource management and optimization. The wireless mesh network technology is a promising infrastructure solution to support these smart functionalities, while it has some inherent vulnerabilities and cyber-attack risks to be addressed. As Smart Grid is heavily relying on the underlie communication networks, which makes their security and dependability issues critical to the entire smart grid technology. Several studies have been conducted in the field of Smart Grid security, but few works were focused on the dependability and its associated resource analysis of the control center networks. In this paper, we have investigated the dependability modeling and also resource allocation in redundant communication networks by adopting two mathematical approaches, Reliability Block Diagrams (RBD) and Stochastic Petri Nets (SPNs), to analyze the dependability of control center networks in Smart Grid environment. We have applied our proposed modeling approach in an extensive case study to evaluate the availability of smart gird networks with different redundancy mechanisms. A combination of dependability models and reliability importance are used to analyze the network availability according to the most important components. We also show the variation of network availability in accordance with Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) in different network architectures.