College of Engineering

A Master thesis was discussed in Department of Electrical Engineering / College of Engineering at  University of Mosul entitled ” Security enhancement of IEC 61850 communication network in the smart electrical substation ” Supervised By Assist. Prof. Dr. Firas Sami Haseeb Alsharbaty, On Wednesday, September, 3, 2025.
The thesis presented by Mohammed Abd Al-Rahim Abd Al-Nabi aimed to design and evaluate an efficient communication network for a 33/11 kV smart substation based on the IEC 61850 standard, ensuring both real-time protection requirements and cybersecurity against potential threats, by integrating wired, wireless, and hybrid topologies with lightweight algorithms to maintain data integrity without violating latency constraints.
The thesis discusses different communication topologies (wired, wireless, and hybrid) simulated using OPNET, and analyzes the effect of additional security overhead on the transmission of GOOSE and SV messages. It also introduces a cyber threat model and proposes lightweight cryptographic solutions supported by embedded hardware accelerators in IEDs.

The results showed that the secured wired topology achieved excellent performance with end-to-end latency not exceeding 0.169ms, while the hybrid networks provided reliable operation under the 4ms threshold with full reliability. In contrast, traditional wireless networks failed to meet real-time protection requirements.

The current study is considered one of the sustainable studies to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, especially the ninth goal “Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure” and the eleventh goal “Sustainable Cities and Communities” by promoting academic research in the field of smart energy grid security, and the ninth goal “Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure” by providing innovative solutions to develop the infrastructure of smart substations, thus ensuring the sustainability and reliability of electrical networks.