iCASM: An Information-Centric Network Architecture for Wide Area Measurement Systems

Wide Area Measurement Systems (WAMS) use an underlying communication network to collect and analyze data from devices in the power grid, aimed to improve grid operations. For WAMS to be effective, the communication network needs to support low packet latency and low packet losses. Internet Protocol (IP), the pervasive technology used in today's communication networks uses loop-free best-paths for data forwarding, which increases the load on these paths causing delays and losses in delivery. Information-Centric Networking (ICN), a new networking paradigm, designed to enable a data-centric information sharing, natively supports the concurrent use of multiple transmission interfaces, in-networking caching, as well as per-packet security and can provide better application support. In this paper, we present iCASM, an ICN-based network architecture for wide area smart grid communications. We demonstrate through simulations that iCASM achieves low latency and 100% data delivery even during network congestion by leveraging multiple available paths; thus significantly improving communication resiliency in comparison to an IP-based approach. iCASM can be used immediately on today's Internet as an overlay.