Smart grid communications: Modeling and validation

The Special Issue of the Journal of Network and Computer Applications discusses papers on advances in the development of communication and networking technologies for emerging issues in smart grids. Sbordone and colleagues, the authors reported the implementation of a monitoring control program to manage the reactive power of a real energy storage system in a micro-grid. They presented the real-time requirements of the application on the communications and the implementation based on the integration of different elements. In Alcaraz and colleagues, the authors discussed the high- level control and management of the smart grids by using the concept of super-node. The topics include interoperability, transparency, reliability, and other performance metrics that are closely related to the security of the smart grids entities to be accessed and controlled by the super-node. In Amoah and colleagues, the authors reported a flaw identified through the application of the formal method, i.e., Colored Petri Nets (CPN),to the DNP3 secure authentication(SA)procedures, and provided a countermeasure strategy for the security flaw. In Yi and colleagues, the authors presented a DoS attack, called puppet attack, in which some nodes are compromised and become puppet nodes for the attacker. The result is denial of service in the AMI network. In Bae and colleagues, the authors addressed the issue of preserving AMI traffic data privacy while reducing the traffic by aggregation, using a specific traffic aggregation and security processing method.