Peer-to-Peer Networks Applied to Power Grid*

Hakem Beitollahi Geert Deconinck

Hakem.Beitollahi@esat.kuleuven.be Geert.Deconinck@esat.kuleuven.be
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Electrical Engineering, Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, Leuven, Belgium

Abstract
In order to improve and deploy distributed control
systems for the power grid a robust ICT
infrastructure is required partially based on
dependable middleware that exploits redundancy and
diversity in communication networks.
The dynamic nature of power grid applications
makes necessity of using peer-to-peer (P2P)
networks in this system. The main requirements of
P2P networks for power grid are that they are
scalable, self-organizing and distributed.
Furthermore they degrade gracefully in the advent of
failures, restore automatically after repair and need
to cope with dynamic environment.
This paper at first classifies P2P networks according
their architecture and compares them. Then it
analyzes P2P networks based on their architectures
for controlling power grid components. It shows
hybrid decentralized indexing P2P networks are best
choice and most suitable architecture for power grid.

1. Introduction
The power grid transports and distributes electricity
from the power plants to the consumers [1] (figure
1). Improving performance of power grid (optimize
power quality, cost, energy loss, etc.) needs
precise management and distributed control [2].
Since Sep 11, 2001 the security of major
international and national infrastructures in all
countries has became a more critical concern to
governments and industry. So nowadays a
dependable networked ICT system for the
management and control of the electric power grid is
desired [3]. CRUTIAL (CRitical UTility
InfrastructurAL resilience) is a recently started
European IST research project addressing
dependable network for the management of the
electric power grid, in which agents controlling the
*
Acknowledgements: This project is partially supported by the K.U.Leuven Research Council (project GOA/2007/09) and by
the European Commission (projects IST-4-27513 CRUTIAL and IST-4-026923 GRID).
Figure 1: power grid with a small number of power plants
connected to the meshed high voltage grid and distributed
generation and loads in the radial low voltage distribution
physical process of electricity distribution need to be
connected with information infrastructures, through
corporate networks, which are in turn connected to
the internet.
The dynamic nature of applications on power grid
(e.g. the Autonomous Electricity Network
applications [4]) makes that information
infrastructure on power grid is needed not only for
static configuration but also for modification during
run time of application. For example the set of
components that needs to communicate varies over
time because of switching of generators and loads in
the distributed generation and hence, the logical
communication topology has to follow accordingly
[2]. This dynamic nature of applications provides
opportunities to use peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.
The main requirements of P2P networks for power
girds are that they are scalable, self-organizing and
distributed. Furthermore they degrade gracefully in
the advent of failures, restore automatically after
repair and can cope with dynamic environment. They
allow construction of a communication structure that
requires little communication and also allow
implementation of distributed algorithms for the
control and coordination among nodes as well as for
the aggregation of measured data. So studying and
analyzing P2P networks carefully and studying
whether they are sufficiently dependable for power
grid is very necessary.
This paper classifies the P2P networks based on their
architectures and enumerates the advantages and
disadvantages of them. It then evaluates and analyzes
P2P networks for controlling power grid components
and shows the hybrid decentralized indexing P2P
type is the good and suitable choice for power grid.
This paper provides guidance for researchers and
practitioners to design robust and effective P2P
networks applications requiring basic knowledge
about P2P networks, accessibility, fault resilience,
control mechanisms of power grid and how a
computer network like P2P is applied to power grid.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: in
section 2 definition of P2P is presented. Section 3
presents the P2P architectures. Section 4 briefly
studies the basic control base for new power grid
system. Section 5 shows P2P network is a new
opportunity for controlling power grid components
and section 6 presents conclusion.
2. Peer-to-Peer systems
Many different definitions for P2P exist [5-10]; we
can extract several principles about P2P networks
from these definitions that will be useful in the
context of power grid.
1) The principle of resource sharing: all P2P
networks have an aspect of file or resource
sharing (both physical resources and logical
resources). As a result of resource sharing,
applications can be realized which it could not
be set up by a single node.
2) The principle of decentralization: Parts of the
network or even the entire network are no longer
operated centrally. Decentralization is a
particular character of P2P networks in order to
avoid single point of failure as well as
performance bottlenecks in the network.
3) The principle of self-organization: as a result
of decentralization, there exists no longer a node
that can centrally coordinate its activity or a
database to centrally store global information
about the system. Therefore nodes have to self-
organize themselves, based on whatever local
information is available and interacting with
locally reachable nodes.
In the last few years, P2P systems have rapidly
evolved and emerged as a promising platform to
deploy new applications and services in the internet
[11, 12]. One of the reasons P2P systems are seen as
an excellent platform for large scale distributed
systems is their resilience in the presence of node
failures. However malicious faults (attacks) are
serious threats in these systems.
3. Peer-to-peer Architecture
According to differences of query search mechanism,
logical topology and degree of decentralization, the
P2P architecture can be classified into four types.
a) Purely unstructured decentralized
This P2P system is a distributed system without any
centralized control. In such systems all nodes are
equivalent in functionality. In these systems nodes
are named as servant (SERver + cliENT). This means
all nodes of a P2P system can act at the same time as
server as well as a client. The logical P2P topology in
these systems is often random and unstructured mesh.
The query is executed hop-by-hop through the mesh
till success/failure or timeout. An example of these
systems is Gnutella [13].
Routing algorithm:
Purely unstructured systems like Gnutella use
flooding broadcast of queries for routing. In these
systems each query from a peer is flooded
(broadcasted) to directly connected peers, which
themselves flood their peers and etc., until the
request is answered or a maximum number of
flooding steps occur.
Different flooding policies have been implemented to
improve search in these systems. In Gnutella to find a
file, a node issues queries to its neighbors. The most
typical query method is flooding where the query is
broadcasted to all neighbors (hops) within certain
TTL (Time-To-Live) value. At each hop the value of
the TTL is decremented, and when it reaches zero the
message is dropped. In order to avoid loops, the Examples of this system are Chord [14], CAN [15],
nodes use the unique message identifiers to detect and Pastry [16].
and drop duplicated messages. When the file was
found in a certain node, it initiates a direct out-of- Routing algorithm:
network download, establishing a direct connection In these systems the routing model adds structure to
between the source and target node (figure 2). the way information about resources are stored using
distributed hash tables. This structure provides a
mapping between the resource identifier and location,
in the form of distributed routing table. With this
method the queries can be efficiently routed to the
node with the desired resource. This method also
reduces the number of hops that must be taken to
locate a resource. Among examples of these systems
we have chosen the Chord routing algorithm.
Figure 3 shows Chord routing model.
N8+1 N14
N8+2 N14
N8+4 N14
N1 N8+8 N14
N8+16 N32
N8 N8+32 N42
Source Finger table

N54 Destinstion
Query N14

Response N51

N48
Figure 2 : Flooding Search N21

N42

• Advantages of these systems: N38 N32

i) They are inherently fault-tolerant, since there is

no central point of failure and the loss of a peer
or even a number of peers can easily be
recovered.
ii) They are flexible and robust.
• Disadvantages of these systems:
i) They are slow in routing.
ii) No guarantee about quality of service.
iii)Predicting system behavior is hard because of
the lack of a global view at the system level.
iv) They are not scalable.
v) Managing the system is hard.
b) Purely structured decentralized
They are similar to P2P systems of group A with this
difference that the logical P2P topology is a
structured topology such as mesh, ring, d-dimension
torus or butterfly. These structured topologies are
usually constructed using distributed hashing tables
(DHT) techniques. The query is also executed hop-
by-hop through the structured topology, and is sure
to be successful after some deterministic hops under
ideal case.
Figure 3: Chord routing model
• Advantages of these systems:
i) They have a quick and efficient query search or
in other words they are quick in routing.
ii) They provide load balancing.
iii) They have a deterministic search guarantee.
iv) They are scalable and robust.
v) Managing the system is easy.
• Disadvantages of these systems:
i) They are vulnerable under malicious attacks. In
comparison with group A they are worse under
malicious attacks because they have
deterministic and structured architecture and this
is a important point for attackers.
ii) They are not flexible.
c) Hybrid centralized indexing
In these systems there is a central server that
maintains directions of information about registered
users to the network. In these systems each arriving
node needs to actively notify the server about its
information, then other nodes only need to search
peer’s address from server about its wanted objects.
There is the end-to-end interaction between two peer
clients. Napster [17] is an example of these systems.
Routing algorithm:
In these systems the peers of the community connect
to a centralized directory server, which stores all
information regarding location and usage of
resources. Upon request from a peer, the central
index will match the request with the best peer in its
directory that matches the request. The best peer
could be the one that is cheapest, fastest, nearest, or
most available, depending on the user needs. Then
the data exchange will occur directly between the
two peers. Napster uses this method. Figure 4 shows
routing in Napster as an example of these systems.
Server
Peer
“Where is X.doc”
A Figure 5: Hybrid decentralized indexing
A has X.doc
Download X.doc
Figure 4: Routing algorithm in Napster
• Advantages of these systems:
i) They are very simple and easy to be deployed.
ii) They are quick and efficient for information
discovery (routing or query search).
iii) Searches are comprehensive and they can
provide guarantee in searches.
iv) Managing the system is easy.
• Disadvantages of these systems:
i) They are vulnerable to malicious attacks.
ii) They are single point failure in server.
iii) They have bad scalability.
iv) They are not so flexible and robust.
d) Hybrid decentralized indexing:
In these systems some nodes that called super-nodes
are central servers and they register users to the
system and also facilitate the peer discovery process.
Super-nodes maintain the central indexes for the
information shared by local peers connected to them
and proxy search requests on behalf of these peers. In
such systems peers are automatically elected to
become super-nodes if they have sufficient
bandwidth and good processing power. Like systems
of group C there is end-to-end interaction (data
exchanging) between two peer clients. Figure 5
shows these systems. Kazaa [18] and Morpheus [19]
are two decentralized indexing systems.
Super-node
Routing algorithm:
In these systems every super-node is associated with
a set of nodes and every node connects to a super-
node to which it belongs. When a search for a data
item issued by node n1, lookup message will follow
the path from a super-node of node n1 to all super
nodes, the operation will repeat until success or until
all paths are completely searched.
• Advantages of these systems:
i) They are quick and efficient for search query
(routing).
ii) In comparison with other groups they reduce the
traffic on message exchanging.
iii) In comparison with group C they reduce the
workload on central server because they have
several servers.
iv) In comparison with group C there is no unique
point of failure. In these systems if one or more
super-nodes go down, the nodes connected to
them can open new connections with others, and
the network can continue the operation. In fact
after super-nodes go down, the existing peers
become super-nodes themselves.
v) They are scalable.
vi) They are flexible and robust.
vii) Managing the system is easy.
• Disadvantages of these systems:
i) In comparison with group A and B they are more
vulnerable to malicious attacks because of super-
nodes.
ii) In comparison with group C, they present slower
information discovery.
4. Basic control base for new power grid
system
Today, there is an important trend to use small
dispersed generators in low or medium voltage, also
referred to as Distributed Generation (DG), for
producing electricity [20, 21, 22].
However, this dramatically changing in power grid
has changed the traditional distributed grid topology,
control systems, security measurements, etc [20, 21].
All these changes put new and extra stress on power
grid where power is one of the most important
commodities for industrial, economical and everyday
activities.
Control of power elements in power grid has three
control levels [4, 22, 23] A) Primary control is used
to balance both active and reactive power, based on
frequency measured locally. This kind of control has
no need for communications. B) Secondary control is
mainly used for maintaining rated voltage levels or
rated frequency and scheduled power transfers C)
tertiary control optimizes generators output for
economic criteria. The last two control levels both
require some form of coordination and
communication with other generator controllers. By
adding DGs to power grid for these levels of control,
traditional central control systems are not suitable
due to expenses such as expensive, dedicated
communication lines and a large number of load
balancing servers. So we are looking for less
expensive ICT-infrastructure for control paradigms.
Agent based control systems
Evolutions in the power grid have convinced us to
design an intelligent, distributed control scheme [2,
24]. In this scheme power grid components (e.g.
generators, dispatching loads) are equipped with an
autonomous control entity (agent). These agents are
implemented on some electronic devices (e.g. PCs or
DSPs). Agents can supervise the grid component at
hand, fetching state parameters of the components of
the component from various sensors. Agents interpret
these parameters and aggregate these into a high
level conclusion on the current state of the
component. Agents may also send control parameters
to the control system (e.g. SCADA) of the
component.
An important aspect of agents, besides autonomy, is
that they communicate with a society of (similar)
agents, from which they may fetch external
knowledge of their interest. This way of exchanging
information enables an agent to not be only aware of
the state of its own component, but also to have a
notion of the global environment in which it is
operating. These societies can be built easily by
setting up a peer-to-peer network.
5. P2P networks for Microgrid control
applications
Agent based control scheme by using P2P
communication opens new opportunities for
controlling power grid elements. Various
applications of agent based control schemes (smart
grids) have been proposed in literature. Here we give
a short overview of some noteworthy applications
and role of P2P network on them.
Intelligent Protection: paper [25] has shown that
malfunctioning or wrongful switching of protection
systems are at basis of 63% of all major system
disturbances. Therefore various schemes are
presented to control these circuit breakers by
intelligent agents, using for example fuzzy logic and
communication with other agents to decide the best
action when a near short circuit current is observed
[26]. By the P2P network, the agent floods the
problem to other agents and then by collective
agreement algorithms they can decide the best action.
All types of P2P network can be useful for this
application especially type B and D for some time
deadlines of best action. This application can also be
done by type D very efficiency. The agent
encountering a problem sends a message to its server
and then the server wants other servers (any server
has some agents) to send their commands for solving
the problem. So the server can decide the best action
intelligently based on all commands.
Agents in Power Market: Multi-agent technology
can be used for real-time online power markets.
Agents buy and/or sell power trying to minimize the
costs and/or maximizing income while meeting the
demand of their master (e.g. generation facility,
factory, household, etc.) [27]. P2P technology
provides directly communication between any two
agents and also provides communication and
discussion of an agent with all other agents. So with
these properties of P2P network and also file sharing simple example of P2P network formed between
property of this network, agents can minimize the agents has shown in figure 6.
costs and/or maximize income according the best
decision in power market.
Supply demand matching: Intelligent forecasting of
demand and generation (e.g. for solar cells or wind
turbines) and matching these by adjusting generator
output or intelligent loads, may reduce regulating
needs and costs [27].
Intelligent load shedding: loads may be switched
off when network load is high, according to some
properties. Heating or air conditioning may be
switched off temporary without anyone noticing,
while hospitals or traffic signals may only be shed
when there are no other options. As nodes (agents
here) are autonomous and self-organized in P2P Low Voltage Distribution Grid with embedded DG
networks, they can switch off some loads like heating
or air condition temporarily based on some
conditions to balance the network load.
Autonomous electricity grid (AEG): An AEG is
low voltage net with a decent amount of DG
installed, that is self-regulating and possibly able to
continue operating, if necessary in a degraded way,
when it is disconnected from the high voltage
transmission grid [2, 28, 29]. We can consider the
control sites of power plants (high voltage plants and
DGs) as LANs where any LAN has a super-node to
communicate with other LANs. Super-nodes
communicate together by a P2P network (recall type
D of P2P architecture). As Super-nodes are members
of P2P network they are autonomous and self-
organized and can leave the network based on their Corresponding Peer-to-peer Network
interest or power grid conditions. With this
architecture the AEG application is implemented. For
example if DG resources are disconnected from the Househould (with smart loads)
high voltage grid, we can consider that super-nodes
of distributed generators’ LANs have been Wind torbin
disconnected from super-nodes of high voltage
generators’ LANs and peer-to-peer connection still
exist among super-nodes of distributed generators’ Fossil fuel driven small generator
LANs.
Photovolic generator

Importance of P2P network for secondary and Peer-to-peer network links

tertiary control
As mentioned before secondary and tertiary controls Public communications
need some form of coordination and communication
LV power line
with other generator’s controllers. For this agents
(generator’s controllers) set up a P2P network which
Grid connected transform
directly or indirectly interconnects all controller
agents in the distribution grid. The topology and
Controller agent
fault-tolerance mechanisms of this overlay network
make it suitable to be used in unbounded systems
using an unreliable open network such as Internet. A Figure 6: Example of P2P network that applied to power grid
Agents communicate together by gossiping
algorithm. In gossiping algorithm, every agent
exchanges information at fixed time intervals with
one of its neighbors (chosen randomly). If that
neighbor exchanges this new information with one of
its neighbors (and so forth), the news spreads in the
network. All types of P2P architectures implement
the gossiping algorithm. In type A it is enough any
node (agent) exchanges information with one of its
random neighbors and so forth. In type B as any node
has its finger table list it is enough any node
exchanges information with members of its finger
table list and then the members exchange information
with members of their finger table list. In types C and
D any node just exchanges information to its server
(super-node) and then server (super-node) spread
information over the network by exchange
information to other its nodes or other servers (super-
nodes) and so forth.
Evaluation of the four P2P types for power grids
Power grid network is a scalable network and
multiple power plants maybe are added to the grid.
Some applications of Power grid have time
deadlines, which mean that the correctness of a
system operation depends not only on its logical
results, but also on the time at which these results
become available. So power grids need a network
with quick and efficient routing. Power grid also
requires efficient management for three control levels
and power components.
With these interpretations and situations type A of
P2P is not suitable for power grid because it is not
scalable; it is slow in routing; and also management
is hard. However this type is good for security and
fault-tolerance.
Type B of P2P networks for power grid is efficient as
it is scalable; it is quick and efficient in routing and
also management is easy. However, this type is more
vulnerable from security outlook due to deterministic
and structural architecture.
Type C is not good for power grid as it has bad
scalability; it is vulnerable from security point of
view because it is enough that the attacker only
considers the server, which is a single point of failure
(SPF). However, it is simple and easy for
management and it has quick routing.
As power grid applications shows, type D of P2P is
the most suitable and best for power grid because it is
scalable and flexible; it has quick and efficient
routing. It has not SPF points like type C;
management is easy and it is more secure in
comparison with other types except type A.
6. Conclusion
Considering advantages and disadvantages of
different architecture of P2P networks, system
designer can choose a topology for their system
according to their requirements.
Evaluations in the power grid show it requires an
intelligent, distributed and dynamic control system.
P2P networks are good and suitable choice for power
grid due to dynamism, scalable, self-organizing, and
decentralized nature.
Preliminary studies on P2P types (considering
advantages and disadvantages of P2P types and
resilience of P2P types to random faults and attacks)
show type D, the hybrid decentralized indexing type,
is the most suitable and best for power grid among
P2P types because of scalability, flexibility, quick
and efficient routing and easy management.
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