Smart grid cyber-physical systems: communication technologies, standards and challenges

The recent developments in embedded system design and communication technologies popularized the adaption of the cyber-physical system (CPS) for practical applications. A CPS is an amalgamation of a physical system, a cyber system, and their communication network. The cyber system performs extensive computational operations on the data received from the physical devices, interprets the data, and initiates effective control actions in real-time. One such CPS is the smart grid CPS (SG-CPS) consisting of physical devices with diverse communication requirements, and intermediate communication networks. Thus, reliable communication networks are paramount for the effective operation of the SG-CPS. This paper is an elaborate survey on the communication networks from the perspective of the SG-CPS. This paper presents the state-of-art communication technologies that can meet the communication requirements of the various SG-CPS applications. The communications standards and communication protocols are also comprehensively discussed. A systematic mapping among communication technologies, standards, and protocols for various SG-CPS applications has been presented based on an extensive literature survey in this paper. Furthermore, several challenges, such as security, safety, reliability and resilience, etc., have been addressed from SG-CPS’s perspective. This work also identifies the research gaps in the various domains of the SG-CPS that can be of immense benefit to the research community.