George Flammer, Chief Scientist at Silver Springs Networks
The Silver Spring Smart Energy Platform provides the network, software, and services needed as the foundation for the Smart Grid. Their network infrastructure includes the wireless Access Points (APs) and Relays that forward data from endpoints across the utility’s backhaul or WAN infrastructure into the back office. George said that utilities were quite different than other critical infrastructure industries (public safety, emergency responders, police, etc). Some distinquishing characteristics of utilties:
- Huge service territories: Wherever people live or work, wherever lights are on, and all spaces in between
- Complete ubiquity:“95% coverage in U.S.
- Visible, public, and vulnerable (there are electrical wires everywhere)
- Long deployment lifetimes. Some emergency services deploy ‘on the spot’, but utilities can’t deploy that quickly.
- Utility personnel are uniquely trained to respond rapidly to natural disasters.
Investor-owned utilities are profit making organizations. They prefer to own infrastructure and generally only use public telcos/ other carriers for cost reasons. During disasters they almost always fall back to their owned communication systems.
Utilities face a variety of threats that could disrupt service. These include: Insider threats, human/system errors, and (most dangerous) cyber threats. George delineated four necessities to combat these operational threats:
- Configuration management: what revision is running?
- Guard Borders: what are the attack perimeters?
- Established processes: well vetted, known strengths and weaknesses.
- Forensics: track all security events.
Smart Grid has several distinguishing attributes which need to be reallized by utilities:
- Consumer communications
- Ubiquitous coverage
- Network ‘pre-heals’
- Grid ‘self-heals’
- Future-proof
- Open standards
Independent of mesh, star, or fully connected network topology, frequency agility and massive redundancy are required for a robust Smart Grid communications network. Utilities currently control the operation of their grid over multi-node wireless networks which monitor utility sensors, perform command and control actions, detect and scope outages, and communicate protective information. These networks deliver GB/day and deterministically low latency round trip time (~3-5 seconds). Architecturally they are like the Internet – a mesh network. Wirelessly, they are predominantly frequency hopping systems because FHSS systems are spectrum efficient, more robust than fixed frequency systems, and typically license free.
But there’s a huge problem for Smart Grid wireless networks. In the US, the wireless spectrum is shared and it is well known that:
- Part 90 devices are ‘presumed to not interfere.
- But, dominant source of signals in the band, especially outside, is the Smart Grid.
- Spectrum is ‘sub-optimal’ – which is why it is available for nearly free.
- But, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine to Machine (M2M) market is just starting to take off. When it does, look out for a whole lot more interference.
Mr. Flammer made the following recommendations for utilities to deal with the shared spectrum problem:
- Allocate useful spectrum, especially for command and control operations
- Harmonize operation intra- and internationally
- Dispatch centers within utilities to be linked with other 1st responder dispatch centers
In summary, George re-iterated three points regarding utilities Integrated Critical Infrastructure:
- Utilities are big, public, vulnerable critical communications infrastructure organizations
- Smart Grid technologies are rising to the challenge
- Spectrum availability/operational harmonization is in the public interest
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