Sensing and monitoring electrical signals and power device parameters within the smart grid network infrastructure plays a fundamental role in assessing the smart devices' proper functioning. Nevertheless, a key challenge for academic teaching and researching purposes is the elevated cost of real electronic devices, such as current and potential transformers, or even intelligent electronic devices. Therefore, traffic emulators are a valuable solution for the evaluation of new smart grid communication proposals. In this work, we propose TITAN, a tool to support the evaluation of automation systems' communication networks. TITAN enables the emulation of IEC 61850 communication, ranging from data sensing to data acquisition, thus supporting extensive research and development on this fundamental smart grid domain. This tool can interact and communicate with real elements, such as intelligent electronic devices. It enables the emulation of voltage and current data sensing communication, as well as the implementation of different data acquisition schemes by an emulated supervisory system. Our main contributions are: (i) TITAN, a tool with a distributed microservices architecture to execute communication traffic generation tasks; (ii) a user-friendly interface to integrate and manage all components; and (iii) a proof of concept testbed using TITAN and real teleprotection devices. Real case studies using TITAN reveal its feasibility in supporting low-cost testbeds for research, teaching, and testing purposes in sensing and acquisition for automation systems.

In this paper, we propose three mechanisms to reduce the broadcast storm problem in wireless mesh networks based on the Named-Data Network (NDN) architecture. The goal of our mechanisms is to reduce the number of content requests forwarded by nodes and consequently, increase the network efficiency. The first proposed mechanism, called Probabilistic Interest Forwarding (PIF), randomly forwards content requests. The second mechanism, called Retransmission-Counter-based Forwarding (ReCIF), decides to forward content requests based on the number of retransmissions by adding a counter to the header of requests. The third mechanism, called ReCIF+PIF, combines the features of PIF and ReCIF to suppress content requests. We compare the performance of our mechanisms with both the NDN default forwarding mechanism and the Listen First Broadcast Later (LFBL) mechanism. Our proposals outperform the default NDN forwarding mechanism by up to 21% regarding the data delivery rate in dense networks and provide a 25% lower delivery delay than the default NDN. Our mechanisms accomplish this performance by only reducing the number of content requests forwarded by nodes. One of our mechanisms, PIF, outperforms LFBL regarding the data delivery rate and delivery delay by up to 263% and 55%, respectively, for high network contention levels.