Delivery Requirements and Implementation Guidelines for the NASPInet Data Bus

The bulk power system faces many challenges as load growth continues to far outstrip new transmission capacity, utility operators are retiring in large numbers, and renewable sources of energy and microgrids with very different power characteristics must be integrated into electricity grids and be actively managed. NASPInet holds great promise to help improve the reliability, efficiency, and cyber-security of the bulk power system. In order to achieve this potential, NASPInet must support a wide range of guarantees for latency, rate, and availability. It also must support delivery with extremely stringent values of low latency and high availability, and do so across a wide area even in the face of potential IT failures and cyber-attacks. In this paper, we describe the baseline delivery requirements for performance and fault-tolerance that NASPInet must provide if it is to meet those goals. We then offer twenty implementation guidelines that we argue must be met if the delivery requirements are to be implementable and at reasonable cost. These guidelines are based on a number of sources, including our 11 years of designing and developing GridStat (an implementation of the NASPInet Data Bus), the experience of us and others on projects by DARPA and others involving wide-area, real-time, fault-tolerant, and secure middleware for wide-area networks, and the state of the art and practice in networking and distributed computing. Finally, we summarize the coverage of those delivery requirements and implementation guidelines that middleware, networking protocols IP Multicast and MPLS, and power protocols C37.118 and IEC 61850, provide.