  Smart grids integrate communication systems with power networks to enable
power grids operation and command through real-time data collection and control
signals. Designing, analyzing, and simulating smart grid infrastructures as
well as predicting the impact of power network failures strongly depend on the
topologies of the underlying power network and communication system. Despite
the substantial impact that the communication systems bring to smart grid
operation, the topology of communication systems employed in smart grids was
less studied. The power community lacks realistic generative communication
system models that can be calibrated to match real-world data. To address this
issue, this paper proposes a framework to generate the underlying topological
graphs for the communication systems deployed in smart grids by mimicking the
topology of real-world smart grids. In this regard, we have updated the
Chung-Lu algorithm to guarantee the communication network connectivity and to
match the degree distribution of a real-world smart grid rather than following
an expected degree distribution. In addition, key characteristics of
communication systems such as diameter, average shortest paths, clustering
coefficients, assortativity, and spectral gap were taken into consideration to
generate the most similar real-world communication network for smart grid
studies. We believe that the proposed algorithm to generate realistic cyber
graphs for smart grid studies will benefit the power community.
