This paper explores a Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack targeting AC charging points for electric vehicles (EVs), demonstrating the ability to covertly control the vehicle’s charging process without detection by either the charging station or the vehicle. The attack was conducted successfully in both controlled laboratory environments and real-world settings, exposing vulnerabilities in the communication protocols between the charging station and the vehicle. By intercepting and manipulating the communication, an attacker can adjust the charging rate, reducing, increasing, or halting the charging process altogether. This not only affects individual vehicles but could have a broader impact on the electrical grid, especially as the use of high-power EV chargers continues to grow. With the rapid increase in electric vehicle adoption worldwide, the potential for synchronized attacks on multiple charging points presents a significant risk to grid stability, from local affections to higher widespread impacts. This research then underscores the need for stronger cybersecurity measures to protect the charging infrastructure and prevent large-scale disruptions to energy systems.

Cosimulation platforms are necessary to study the interactions of complex systems integrated in future smart grids. The Virtual Grid Integration Laboratory (VirGIL) is a modular cosimulation platform designed to study interactions between demand-response (DR) strategies, building comfort, communication networks, and power system operation. This paper presents the coupling of power systems, buildings, communications, and control under a master algorithm. There are two objectives: first, to use a modular architecture for VirGIL, based on the functional mockup interface (FMI), where several different modules can be added, exchanged, and tested; and second, to use a commercial power system simulation platform, familiar to power system operators, such as DIgSILENT PowerFactory. This will help reduce the barriers to the industry for adopting such platforms, investigate and subsequently deploy DR strategies in their daily operation. VirGIL further introduces the integration of the quantized state system (QSS) methods for simulation in this cosimulation platform. Results on how these systems interact using a real network and consumption data are also presented.

Power line communication has recently attracted the attention of energy companies as a useful and natural technology for building the advanced metering infrastructure. In this context, device language message specification/companion specification for energy metering (DLMS/COSEM) is an increasingly popular standardised application protocol for communication between utilities and their customers. This study analyses the communication performance that can be expected when using the power line communication technology, powerline intelligent metering evolution (PRIME), to send DLMS/COSEM messages. Physical phenomena – such as background and impulsive noise sources, channel attenuation and multi‐path effect – are taken into account during the first step in the evaluation of this technology's communication performance in the physical layer. This metric is then used in upper layers to compute the packet error rate. An analysis is carried out at the application layer in terms of expected latency in different communication environments. Several simulations are performed in a European low‐voltage topology to compute the number of metres that can be read within 15 min. These simulations were carried out using MATLAB and OMNeT++ software.

This paper proposes a simulation's architecture that allows for the analysis of the performance when using the Power Line Communication's technology. In concrete, it studies the viability of PRIME' standard, to send Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) messages through a low voltage network. In contrast with other studies, physical phenomena-such as background and impulsive noise sources, channel attenuation and multipath effect-are taken into account by Mat lab simulations. Additionally, OMNeT++ network simulator is used to model the telematic effects that occur in the communication process. As an example of the kind of output that can be obtained by the proposed architecture, the paper analyses the end-to-end's performance at application layer in terms of round-trip latency. Several simulations are performed in a European low-voltage network topology to compute the number of meters that can be polled within 15 minutes. Additionally, one experiment tries to determine the optimal position of one of the key nodes in PRIME's networks: the SWITCH node.

The present work analyses and compares two of the most popular specifications for data transmission over power line networks: PoweRline Intelligent Metering Evolution (PRIME) and G3‐power line communication (G3‐PLC). A simulation model has been built using Matlab software in order to evaluate their respective performances with special focus on impulsive noise environments. For this purpose, Middleton's Class‐A noise model was used in conjunction with measured noise parameters reported in the literature for the narrow‐band spectrum. The performance is measured in terms of bit error rate versus signal to noise ratio. Simulation results show how G3‐PLC outperforms PRIME when the channel is impaired by such type of noise. Moreover, although the use of compressive sensing to cancel impulsive noise in communications has already been proposed in other studies, this paper details a modification based on Partial Fourier Matrix indexing according to difference sets. Results from simulations report an almost complete cancellation of the impulsive noise effects. An advantage of this technique is that no redundancy is added to the message; therefore no decrement in the transmission rate is experienced.