Physical Layer Security of AMI Data Transmission in Smart Grid Environment

Abstract

Smart Grid (SG) is the next generation power sys- tem having automated mechanisms for transmission, distribution and generation. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) in SG, is used for the effective monitoring and controlling of the electric- ity consumption by the end users and is considered as one of the core components of SG. However, AMI is susceptible to various types of cyber-attacks, as it consists of components which are vulnerable to various types of attacks in SG . Therefore physical layer security becomes the important aspect in SG. Motivated from these facts, in this paper, we present Low Density parity check (LDPC) coding scheme for the Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel to improve the security at physical layer used in AMI for bidirectional data transfer between meter and SG. Specifically, we designed the scheme for securing the wireless communication channel in AMI from the eavesdropping attack. The proposed scheme is efficient as it minimizes the Bit Error Rate (BER) at the legitimate receiver to lower values of Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), thus making it difficult for an eavesdropper to listen and to modify the data transmission taking place bi- directionally. Moreover, it significantly reduces the usage of SNR, which leads to low power consumption. Numerical analysis shows that 25% and 41% improvements are observed in SNR using our proposed scheme as compared to the existing schemes i.e., hamming coded and uncoded data transmission.