Building a testing environment for SDN networks analysis for electrical grid applications

Cyberattacks are becoming a serious thread for power systems; its prevention is gaining attention and needs to be better understood by developers, technology providers and network operators among others. In order to gain knowledge on such risks, and due to the fact that power systems are critical infrastructures, there is the need to have laboratories that allow developing such tests without putting at risk the energy service. To this aim, such laboratory must include two flexible networks (i.e. communications and electrical) which are completely integrated and allow to identify the impact of one into the other. In this paper, a testing platform developed by IREC for programmable communication networks integrated into electrical microgrids is presented. Such integrated lab-testing platform is aimed to meet the requirements of smart grids in terms of intelligent control, communications, monitoring and self-healing techniques as well to allow testing cybersecurity developments.