iPaCS: An integrative power and cyber systems co-simulation framework for smart grid

Geographically distributed phasor measurement units (PMUs) connected to phasor data concentrators (PDCs) through various cyber network topologies result in latency and bandwidth constrained. These factors need to be analyzed and optimized during the evaluation of their impact on the data stream based applications, which is essential in wide area measurement and monitoring systems (WAMS). This paper presents an integrative Power and Cyber systems (iPaCS) framework, and discusses the iPaCS testbed design for an integration of PMU and PDC software systems through ns-3 cyber simulator. PMU and PDC software packages of an iPDC open-source software system installed in dedicated virtual machines act as measurement emulators for a power system network, whereas a dedicated virtual machine used for executing the ns-3 software system simulates networks of communicating nodes and the traffic between them. Linux containers, lightweight virtualization technology, are used for creating the virtual machines environment. The iPaCS testbed is suitable to evaluate applications such as 1) impact of latency and bandwidth on WAMS data stream based control and protection applications, 2) congestion effect due to various data traffic scenarios between PMU and PDC systems, and 3) impact of cyber attacks on power system networks. A two area four-machine power system is considered to demonstrate the testbed for various datasets in a cyber network topology. Results such as latency for the chosen datasets evaluate its impact on WAMS.