Analyzing NASPInet data flows

One of the missions of the North American SynchroPhasor Initiative (NASPI) is to create a robust, widely available and secure synchronized data measurement infrastructure, dubbed NASPInet, that will improve reliability of the power grid. Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU), a GPS clock synchronized measurement device capable of measuring the current and voltage phasors in the power grid, is the main measurement device that NASPInet envisions to support. While the dataflow, latency and to some extent security requirements for individual PMU applications that depend on the measurement infrastructure have been characterized, this work undertakes the challenge of characterizing the collective dataflow, latency and security requirements of the measurement infrastructure when using different network architectures and when multiple PMU applications simultaneously utilize NASPInet. For our analysis we focus on a case study where we model a scalable scenario in NASPInet for a part of the North American Power Grid, the western interconnect, using Network Simulator v2 (NS-2).