Rogue Base Stations Detection for Advanced Metering Infrastructure Based on Signal Strength Clustering

Qian Bin,Su Sheng,Cai Ziwen,Hong Liang,Xiao Yong

doi:10.1109/access.2019.2934222

Abstract

The smart meters and meter collectors in Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), which are installed in every home, rely on wireless Virtual Private Network (VPN) for communicating with Head End System (HES). Therefore, they are prone to suffer from malicious cyber-attack. Usually, based on General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) communicated method is the most popular for meter collectors and consequently they are vulnerable to rogue Base Stations (BS) and get compromised by malicious adversaries further. Thus a Density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) method is employed to filter rogue BSs out and prevent meter collectors from attaching to them, because there is a notable difference between Signal Strength (SS) profile of legitimate BSs and rogue BSs, Numerical simulation indicates that the proposed approach is capable of detecting both stationary and moving rogue BSs online within fixed time window effectively. Moreover, the method can be implemented in existing meter collectors with limited computation resource. In conclusion, the proposed approach can enhance the level of cyber security of meter collectors.

Highlights

Smart meters and meter collectors in Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) are the most visible parts of the smart grid in daily life, which play an important role in two-way communications between customers and the utility [1]
While the communication means between meter collectors and smart meters are Power Line Communication (PLC) or RS-485, meter collectors communicate with Head End System (HES) by General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) [3]
To secure the communication between meter collectors and Base Stations (BS), a rogue BSs detection approach for AMI based on Signal Strength (SS) clustering is proposed in this paper

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Smart meters and meter collectors in AMI are the most visible parts of the smart grid in daily life, which play an important role in two-way communications between customers and the utility [1]. A rogue BSs detection approach based on SS profile clustering is proposed in this paper. We propose a rogue BSs detection approach for AMI based on SS profile clustering. Since it is difficult for meter collectors with limited computational resource to detect and extract the RFF of all legitimate BSs, the SS profile is utilized as a steady-state RFF due to fixed location between meter collectors and BSs. The proposed approach can adapt to existing meter collectors with limited computational resource and no retrofit on other.

BACKGROUND

NUMERICAL SIMULATION

IDENTIFICATION OF STATIONARY ROGUE BSS

CONCLUSION