Survivable smart grid communication: Smart-meters meshes to the rescue

Smart grids are critical cyber-physical infrastructures in the world now. Since these infrastructures are prone to large scale outages due to disasters or faults, a resilient and survivable communication architecture is desired. In this work, we propose a resilient and survivable hierarchical communication architecture for the smart grid that mirrors the hierarchy of the existing power grid. Post-disaster resilience in grid communication is achieved through the grid flattening process. This process involves smart-meters and other disaster surviving elements of higher system levels of the grid forming a wireless mesh network. The flattened network of grid elements with one-hop communication links help in reliable and timely relaying of grid´s health information to working regions of the grid. This allows for swift action by control engineers of the utility provider and emergency services with real-time data. We propose analytical models to study the performance of the flattened architecture as a function of outage area, smart-meter density and smart-meter´s neighborhood size. The results from the analytical model will be compared with simulation results from OPNET.