Grid-Side Communication Requirements for Small Modular Reactors as Ancillary Service Providers in the Smart Grid
IEEE 14th International Conference on Smart Grid, Suceava, Romanya, 6 - 09 Temmuz 2026, ss.1-6, (Tam Metin Bildiri)
- Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Tam Metin Bildiri
- Basıldığı Şehir: Suceava
- Basıldığı Ülke: Romanya
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.1-6
- Gazi Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
As small modular reactors (SMRs) take on active roles in smart grid operation, they are expected to provide ancillary services such as primary frequency response, automatic generation control (AGC), and voltage support. Delivering these services demands a communication infrastructure different from that of classical nuclear plant telemetry. This paper examines, at the protocol layer, the grid-side communication architecture connecting SMR facilities to the transmission system operator (TSO; TEİAŞ in Türkiye), using the Turkish power system as the reference context, and proposes a concrete protocol–security mapping for four control layers. First, the timing and interoperability requirements spanning millisecond-to-hourly scales preclude any single protocol from satisfying all four layers. Second, the 3 ms delivery envelope of IEC 61850 GOOSE conflicts with RSA/ECDSA-based signature protection under IEC 62351-6 in software, whereas message authentication code (MAC)-based authentication fits within the same envelope. Accordingly, a layered architecture is proposed that confines GOOSE traffic to an electrically isolated plant zone while employing TLS-secured IEC 60870-5-104 at the grid interface. The proposed architecture is consistent with TEİAŞ’s existing infrastructure and Türkiye’s 2050 nuclear targets, and its per-layer timing margins are validated by an ns-3 network simulation under realistic packet contention and cross-traffic.