Software-Defined Microgrid Control for Resilience Against Cyber Attacks
For operators of DC microgrids, this work provides a method to enhance resilience against cyber attacks, though it is an incremental application of SDN principles to a specific domain.
The paper proposes a software-defined microgrid control architecture that separates data and control planes, using power talk communication for resilience against denial-of-service attacks. The approach outperforms static microgrids in performance and attack resilience.
Microgrids (MGs) rely on networked control supported by off-the-shelf wireless communications. This makes them vulnerable to cyber-attacks, such as denial-of-service (DoS). In this paper, we mitigate those attacks by applying the concepts of (i) separation of data plane from network control plane, inspired by the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm, and (ii) agile reconfiguration of the data plane connections. In our architecture, all generators operate as either voltage regulators (active agents), or current sources (passive agents), with their operating mode being locally determined, according the global information on the MG state. The software-defined MG control utilizes the fact that, besides the data exchange on the wireless channel, the power-grid bus can be used to create side communication channels that carry control plane information about the state of the MG. For this purpose, we adopt power talk, a modem-less, low-rate, power-line communication designed for direct current (DC) MGs. The results show that the proposed software-defined MG offers superior performance compared to the static MG, as well as resilience against cyber attacks.