GNS3 Communication Network Emulation for Substation GOOSE Based Protection Schemes

This paper presents a communication network model used to study the impact of the communication layer on smart grid protection schemes. Communication failure due to hardware malfunction or cyber-attack could lead to major impacts on the smart grid. Some critical devices require real-time data or close to real-time to make the right decision at the right time and keep the system in a stable zone, such as a protection relay. Active man in the middle attack adds additional latency to the packet delivery. A false data injection attack could drive the system to an unstable point, eventually leading to a blackout. This paper designed and implemented communication emulation model for a local area network on the FIU smart grid testbed. Two cases were tested in the developed communication model. In the first case, two physical raspberry pi boards were used to represent two nodes in the smart grid and one traffic generated within the virtual network. In the second case, five ABB Protection Relays and COM600 substation automation devices were connected to GNS3. The two cases showed that GNS3 could be used to emulate the communications network and study the impact of the network performance on the real-world substation environment.