Secure communications for ancillary services

Abstract

Networking of distributed energy resources for ancillary services like control pooling introduces new security challenges. For economic reasons public IP networks are often used for the transport, resulting in sophisticated security requirements. Legacy devices as well as compliance with corporate network security policies must be taken into account. In this paper, we compare different communication technologies and discuss the problems of integrating legacy devices. We describe an approach that uses standardized technologies to provide secure communications for ancillary services, while at the same time requiring minimal configuration by administrators of corporate networks.