New Routing Mechanism of Enabling DNP3 for Smart Distribution System Collaborative Computing

Residential secondary service may account for potentially thousands of devices through networked load- management collaborative computing to realize a smart distribution system. Although TCP/IP-based networks can provide the communication infrastructure for these devices, a severe security issue will present, as these devices are vulnerable to being compromised by cyber-attackers. Use of a disjoint protocol such as DNP3 for SCADA networks provides an effective solution to the security issue. However, DNP3 does not have adequate peer-to-peer networking to support the collaborative computing. This paper proposes an extension protocol layer for DNP3 to facilitate the collaborative computing. This extension offers a routing mechanism that utilizes a variable address structure to create a routing path between communicating devices. The routing path eliminates protocol overhead typically associated with network layers and provides a unique network address for every device in the distribution system. The routing mechanism is interoperable with DNP3- based devices and does not alter the DNP3 specification.