Existing microgrid communication relies on classical public key systems, which are vulnerable to attacks from quantum computers. This paper uses quantum key distribution (QKD) to solve these quantum-era microgrid challenges. Specifically, this paper makes the following novel contributions: 1) it offers a QKD-based microgrid communication architecture for microgrids; 2) it shows how to build a quantum-secure microgrid testbed in an RTDS environment; 3) it develops a key pool sharing (KPS) strategy to improve the cyberattack resilience of the QKD-based microgrid; and 4) it analyzes the impacts of critical QKD parameters with the testbed. Test results provide insightful resources for building a quantum-secure microgrid.
@article{arxiv.2001.02301,
title = {Quantum-Secure Microgrid},
author = {Zefan Tang and Yanyuan Qin and Zimin Jiang and Walter O. Krawec and Peng Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.02301},
year = {2020}
}