Secure advance metering infrastructure protocol for smart grid power system enabled by the Internet of Things

Abstract

The incorporation of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) into Smart Grid applications has piqued the interest of Internet of Things (IoT) experts, who have aided smart city initiatives. One of the fundamental building components of AMI for information sharing is wireless communication networks. Wireless communication networks are prone to a variety of security threats, which causes issues when developing the AMI system in smart city projects. Confidentiality, integrity, availability, and privacy are the primary criteria of cyber-physical systems such as AMI. To meet the needs of cyber-physical systems, we worked on a wireless communication protocol that solves data transmission dependability and data security while consuming little power and overhead. We proposed a novel Secure and Reliable AMI (SRAMI) protocol in this paper using a lightweight cryptographic technique and trust-based mechanism for reliability for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)-assisted AMI. The trust-based approach presents a trustworthy data transfer technique between two communicating AMI entities. In this regard, the next-hop is chosen based on trust-evaluation characteristics such as energy expenditure, geographical distance, and bandwidth availability. Furthermore, a lightweight hybrid approach based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is introduced to meet the data integrity and privacy requirements in the AMI network. SRAMI's performance was improved compared to state-of-the-art protocols in terms of throughput, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), average energy consumption, latency and communication overhead.