Constraints or consequences in the U.S. electricity Smart Grid

Foundational to the development of distributed control systems is the need to understand the constraints imposed by all facets of communication infrastructure. This paper concerns implementation of advanced supervisory data acquisition and control in the emerging U.S. electricity Smart Grid, which is expected to perform new kinds of control tasks on a regional basis within a small number of 60 Hz power cycles. In the context of a layered protocol architecture approach, several activities consume time including propagation and serialization delays; in addition, the introduction of interrupt-drive transactions, connection establishment, authentication, and encryption must also be modeled to ensure that proposed control activities are feasible.