SDAFA: Secure Data Aggregation in Fog-Assisted Smart Grid Environment

Abstract

The tremendous growth of about 8 billion devices connected to each other in various domains of Internet of Things (IoT)-based applications have attracted researchers from both industry and academia. IoT is a network of several devices connected with each other to provide sensing capabilities, particularly in smart grid (SG) environment. Various challenges such as the efficient handling of massive IoT data can be addressed with advances in fog computing. The secure data aggregation challenge is one such issue in IoT-based smart grid systems, which include millions of smart meters. Typical SG-based data aggregation approaches have high computation and communication costs, however, many efforts have been made to overcome these limitations while leveraging fog computing but no satisfactory results have been obtained. Moreover, existing solutions also suffer from high storage requirements. The traditional data aggregation schemes such as GCEDA (Grouping of Clusters for Efficient Data Aggregation) and SPPDA (Secure Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation) also suffer from a few shortcomings. SPPDA follows a mixed aggregation architecture that includes trees and clusters which can lead to some performance complexities and is not energy-efficient, whereas GCEDA does not support heterogeneity. To overcome these problems, this research provides a fog-assisted strategy for secure and efficient data aggregation in smart grid. The concept of smart grid is implemented in fog environment, which was not the case in previous schemes. We used communication between smart meters (SMs) and fog nodes (FNs) to transmit confidential data in compressed form towards FN. The FN further aggregates the received data which can then be updated in cloud repositories later. We presented two algorithms—data aggregation and data extraction at FN and cloud, respectively, to achieve secure communication. The performance of the proposed strategy has been evaluated against existing data aggregation techniques GCEDA and SPPDA for various performance parameters such as storage, communication cost and transmission cost. The proposed scheme overcomes the limitation of heterogeneity and mixed aggregation which was faced in GCEDA and SPPDA and the results revealed outstanding performance in comparison with both, so the proposed solution can be used in a smart grid environment for efficient and secure data transmission.