Enhancing WAMS Communication Network Against Delay Attacks

Smart grid is a typical cyber-physical system, which presents the dependence of power system operations on cyber infrastructure for control, monitoring, and protection purposes. The rapid deployment of synchrophasor measurements units (PMUs) supporting wide area measurement system (WAMS) in the smart grid transmission system has opened opportunities to enhance the grid operations through the introduction of WAMS applications. However, the increased deployment of synchrophasor technologies increases the effective attack surface available to attackers and exposes WAMS applications. Such applications have strict and stringent delay requirements, e.g., end-to-end delay as well as delay variation between measurements from different PMUs. In this paper, we present a mathematical model for constructing forwarding trees for PMUs' measurements which satisfy the end-to-end delay as well as the delay variation requirements of WAMS applications at data concentrators. We illustrate that simple shortest path routing will result in larger fraction of data drop and that our method will achieve better delivery rate. We also validate our method against delay attacks using real-time co-simulation.