Performance Impact of IPsec in Resource-Limited Smart Grid Communication

In recent years, the Internet Protocol (IP) has become a common basis for communication in several automation domains. For smart grids, it is even more beneficial because it brings a unification aspect into a field characterized by a variety of heterogeneous communication protocols which are in use today for various functions and services inside a smart grid. Besides, IP offers a convenient approach to implement security in the communication infrastructure by using its native security extension, IPsec. Nevertheless, IPsec was originally devised for IT environments and not for automation networks. This article therefore analyses the performance impact of IPv6 and IPsec on the end-to-end communication in resource-limited devices using Intel and ARM architectures, respectively. Based on standard Linux as an operating system, we employ a lean measurement setup which can be used even on devices with limited processing power without influencing the measurement results too much. The experimental results show that the influence of security features on the processing time of IPv6 packets is below one millisecond, which should be feasible for many smart grid applications.