Smart Grid Neighborhood Area Networks Research Articles

In-band full-duplex MIMO PLC systems for relaying networks

In Power Line Communications (PLC), there are regulatory masks that restrict the transmit power spectral density for electromagnetic compatibility reasons, which creates coverage issues despite the not too long distances. Hence, PLC networks often employ repeaters/relays, especially in smart grid neighborhood area networks. Even in broadband indoor PLC systems that offer a notable data rate, relaying may pave the way to new applications like being the backbone for wireless technologies in a cost-effective manner to support the Internet-of-things paradigm. In this paper, we study Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) PLC systems that incorporate in-band full-duplex functionality in relaying networks. We present several MIMO configurations that allow end-to-end half-duplex or full-duplex operations and analyze the achievable performance with state-of-the-art PLC systems. To reach this analysis, we get channel realizations from random network layouts for indoor and outdoor scenarios. We adopt realistic MIMO channel and noise models and consider transmission techniques according to PLC standards. The concepts discussed in this work can be useful in the design of future PLC relay-aided networks for different applications that look for a coverage extension and/or throughput: smart grids with enhanced communications in outdoor scenarios, and “last meter” systems for high-speed connections everywhere in indoor ones.

Improvement and Cryptanalysis of a Physically Unclonable Functions Based Authentication Scheme for Smart Grids

Authentication protocols are often used in smart grids to deliver the necessary level of security. A huge number of clients in such a system, however, provides the attacker with the ability to clone them, for example. Device fingerprints, or Physically Unclonable Functions (PUF), have been investigated as an authentication feature to thwart such attacks. In order to accomplish the necessary security in smart grid neighborhood area network communications and to prevent unwanted physical access to smart meters, a former study designed a lightweight authentication system in this way. The suggested protocol uses PUFs to reduce physical attacks. As a consequence, the server/meter impersonation attack is one of the many assaults that this protocol is thought to be secure against. On the other hand, it is generally acknowledged that no security solution should be trusted unless its security has been verified by independent researchers. As a result, this paper assesses the security of this protocol against a typical adversary who has access to or influences over the messages carried over the public channel. This study demonstrates that the attacker is simply capable of impersonating the server for the meter and vice versa. In addition, the suggested attacks desynchronize them, making the adversary the only one capable of interacting with the meter in the role of the legal server rather than the latter. Each of the proposed attacks is extremely effective, and their success probability is almost 1. Finally, a modification is suggested that successfully fixes the protocol’s security weaknesses. The security proof of the improved protocol has been done through the Scyther tool. The computational cost comparison shows that the overhead of the proposed protocol compared to the former scheme is 4.85%, while it withstands various attacks, including traceability, desynchronization, impersonation, man-in-the-middle, and secret disclosure attacks.

Designing a blockchain-enabled privacy-preserving energy theft detection system for smart grid neighborhood area network

In smart grid neighbourhood area network (NAN), the grid utility faces a huge economic loss due to smart meter tampering and energy theft. The faulty meters may increase the cost to consumers. The existing solutions lack in detecting the energy theft accurately and preserving the privacy of the consumers. In this paper, a blockchain-enabled energy theft detection system with privacy-preservation of energy consumption data is proposed for smart grid NAN. It deploys smart contracts viz; energy supply, energy consumption and energy theft detection on the hyperledger besu. Here, the supplied energy to the consumers is monitored using the energy supply contract, whereas the energy consumption is reported to the grid utility through energy consumption contract that preserves privacy of the consumers’ energy consumption data. The energy theft detection contract detects the energy theft and faulty meters accurately. The proposed system is validated using a test-bed at NIT Goa by considering the test scenario of energy theft and faulty smart meters. It achieves >98% accuracy in energy theft detection with sufficient throughput (>98.37 tps) and an affordable latency (<0.42 seconds) of energy data transactions, while fulfilling the energy theft detection requirements in smart grid NAN.

Reliable and QoS aware routing metrics for wireless Neighborhood Area Networking in smart grids

Smart Grid networks use data collected from sensors in evaluating the current system state to make optimal resource distribution decisions and facilitate two-way energy exchange. Efficient and timely communication between smart grid assets using high efficiency and reliable Neighborhood Area Network (NAN) for the last-mile can play a significantly important role. For this requirement, wireless mesh networking can be used to offer scalable, flexible and resilient wireless connectivity. Despite significant advantages and tremendous applications, smart grid NANs are vulnerable to security and reliability issues during electric power delivery. After being compromised by an adversary, cascading-failure-induced disasters may disrupt the power grid from a remote location; customer’s private information may become vulnerable if accessed illegally; the adversary may also compromise selected nodes (change the normal behavior of a node to malicious behavior) and thus fail the critical mission of the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system. Moreover, the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) mechanism of IEEE 802.11e wireless technology can be leveraged for service differentiation based routing among flows of differing priorities. Routing decisions in mesh networks are based on routing metrics which have been the focus of research for the past decade. However, NANs offer a different implementation scenario from traditional mesh infrastructures and also necessitate the need for differentiated quality of service. In this paper, we discuss how state-of-the-art routing metrics have limitations for the NAN scenario, especially for EDCA based differentiated access. Moreover, we propose and design a secure and EDCA based contention-aware routing approach - iRoute, for 802.11e based wireless NANs which enables the selection of reliable routes that also satisfy QoS requirements (low contention, high throughput routes). Simulation-based performance evaluation of the proposed approach shows that it can provide significantly better performance in terms of throughput and delay for NAN communication.

A Lightweight Mutual Authentication for Smart Grid Neighborhood Area Network Communications Based on Physically Unclonable Function

Smart grid as the future of power system improves efficiency, flexibility, and reliability by employing the information and communication technologies. However, these new technologies cause some challenges in security issues in the smart grid. In addition to the active and passive attacks in the communication link, such as tampering and eavesdropping, the physical attacks can also be performed on smart meters. In the absence of hardware protection, physical attacks could easily disrupt the major performance of the system. On the other hand, the security schemes must be designed as lightweight as possible according to the constrained resource of the smart meters. To solve the mentioned problems simultaneously, this article proposes a secure and lightweight protocol based on physically unclonable function for communication between the neighborhood gateways and smart meters. The security analysis shows that the proposed scheme not only resists against the all possible cyber and physical attacks, but also provides confidentiality, integrity, and mutual authentication. Moreover, the comparative performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed scheme is efficient in terms of usage of storage space, communication overhead, and computational cost.

A fair and distributed congestion control mechanism for smart grid neighborhood area networks

The need for significant improvements in the management and efficient use of electrical energy has led to the evolution from the traditional electrical infrastructures towards modern Smart Grid networks. Taking into account the critical importance of this type of networks, multiple research groups focus their work on issues related to the generation, transport and consumption of electrical energy. One of the key research points is the data communication network associated with the electricity transport infrastructure, and specifically the network that interconnects the devices in consumers’ homes, the so-called Neighborhood Area Networks (NANs). In this paper, a new fair and distributed congestion control mechanism for NANs is proposed, implemented and evaluated. The main goal of this mechanism is to provide fairness in the access to the network, thus avoiding that some network nodes monopolize the use of the channels due to their higher traffic generation rate, or to their geographical position. Besides, different priorities have been considered for the traffic flows transmitted by different applications. The goal here is to provide the needed Quality of Service (QoS) to all traffic flows, especially when the traffic load is high. The proposal is evaluated in the context of a wireless ad hoc network composed by a set of smart grid meter devices. Applying our proposed congestion control mechanism leads to performance improvements in terms of packet delivery ratio, network throughput fairness between different traffic sources, packet network transit time and QoS provision.

Predictive Traffic Control and Differentiation on Smart Grid Neighborhood Area Networks

Smart Grid (SG) networks include an associated data network for the transmission and reception of control data related to the electric power supply service. A subset of this data network is the SG Neighborhood Area Network (SG NAN), whose objective is to interconnect the subscribers’ homes with the supplier control center. The data flows transmitted through these SG NANs belong to different applications, giving rise to the need for different quality of service requirements. Additionally, other subscriber appliances could use this network to communicate over the Internet. To avoid network congestion, as well as to differentiate the quality of service (QoS) received by the different data flows, a congestion control mechanism with traffic differentiation capabilities is required. The main contribution of this work is the proposal of a new congestion control mechanism based on machine learning techniques to try to guarantee the different QoS requirements to the different data flows. A main problem when applying machine learning techniques is the need for datasets to be used in the training steps. In this sense, a second contribution of this article is the proposal of a method to generate such datasets by means of simulation techniques. The proposed mechanism is then evaluated in the context of a wireless SG NAN. The nodes of this network are the subscriber’s smart meters, which in turn perform the function of concentrating the data traffic sent and received by the rest of the home appliances. Besides, different machine learning classification methods are taken into account. The evaluation carried out shows significant improvements in terms of network throughput, transit time, and quality of service differentiation. Finally, the computational cost of the algorithms used in this proposal has also been evaluated, using real low-cost IoT hardware platforms.

Proposing a Method for Enhancing the Reliability of RPL Routing Protocol in the Smart Grid Neighborhood Area Networks

Proposing a Method for Enhancing the Reliability of RPL Routing Protocol in the Smart Grid Neighborhood Area Networks

Generating Scale-Free Topology for Wireless Neighborhood Area Networks in Smart Grid

Neighborhood area networks (NANs) are critical infrastructure in smart grid to support communications. With the development of wireless communication technologies, there is a great potential for large-scale wireless-mesh NANs to be deployed to smart grid systems. While there exist theoretical models of complex networks, they are not directly applicable in the generation of network topology for wireless-mesh NANs due to their lack of some specifications unique in smart grid, leading to difficulties in theoretical studies of smart grid NANs. Among various topological structures, scale-free networks are considered as a potential resolution. This paper proposes a systematic approach to generate scale-free topology of wireless-mesh NANs in smart grid. A theoretical analysis confirms the scale-free feature of the network topology generated from the approach. To reveal the characteristics of our approach in comparison with widely used models of general complex networks, simulations are conducted on various network parameters including network diameter, average path length, clustering coefficient, and fractal dimension. The simulation results show that our approach for generating wireless-mesh NAN topology is fundamentally different from these compared models, and thus is a new type of complex-network model. Specifically, our model is suitable for wireless-mesh NANs in smart grid.

Emergency aware congestion control for smart grid neighborhood area networks

The evolution of traditional electricity distribution infrastructures towards Smart Grid networks has generated the need to carry out new research. There are many fields that have attracted the attention of researchers, among which is the improvement of the performance of the so-called Neighborhood Area Networks (NAN). In this sense, and given the critical nature of some of the data transmitted by these networks, maintaining an adequate quality of service (QoS) is absolutely necessary. In emergency situations, this need becomes even more evident. This article presents a congestion control mechanism, whose parameters are modified according to the network state of emergency. The mechanism also applies a multi-channel allocation technique, together with a differentiation in the QoS offered to the different data flows according to their relevance. These proposals have been evaluated in the context of a wireless mesh networks (WMN) made up by a set of smart meter devices, where various smart grids (SG) applications are sending their data traffics. Each SG application must meet its unique quality of service (QoS) requirements, such as reliability and delay. To evaluate the proposals, some NAN scenarios have been built by using the ns-3 simulator and its 802.11s basic model, which was modified to implement the proposed techniques. Compared with the basic Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP), Emergency Aware Congestion Control proposal (EA-HWMP), shows significant improvements in terms of packet delivery ratio, network throughput and transit time.

Constrained Broadcast With Minimized Latency in Neighborhood Area Networks of Smart Grid

Neighborhood area networks (NANs) are essential communication infrastructure in smart grid. They support communications for various applications including time-critical ones. A typical NAN communication scenario is to send commands from a control center simultaneously to a large number of nodes, demanding low-latency broadcast communications. This is challenging due to the limited bandwidth and large number of nodes in wireless NANs. While some broadcast schemes, e.g., opportunistic flooding, have been developed for general wireless sensor networks, they are not optimized for smart grid NANs with unique characteristics and low-latency requirements for time-critical applications. Therefore, a constrained broadcast scheme with minimized latency (CBS-ML) is presented in this paper for low-latency NAN communications. To avoid traffic congestion, it constrains the broadcast to a small number of core nodes. Theoretical developments are presented to show how to select core nodes based on network topology and link reliability. Simulations are conducted to demonstrate the proposed CBS-ML.

A Novel Scheme for Improving the Reliability in Smart Grid Neighborhood Area Networks

A smart grid, as its name implies, is an intelligent grid, which features two-way transmission for electricity and information. A smart grid can deliver various types of electrical services and streamlined, highly efficient energy consumption, but only if its communication systems are highly reliable. A smart grid can be based on wireless networks, which offer high speed and low cost, but problems with wireless technology can impair communications performance and destabilize the smart grid. Wireless local area network (LAN) mesh networks based on IEEE 802.11s can serve as the backbones of smart grids. IEEE 802.11s provides flexible, scalable, high-speed communications with low installation and management costs. In this paper, we first describe IEEE 802.11s, default routing protocol, Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP); Even though HWMP has several shortcomings that destabilize smart grids, we propose a novel scheme to improve smart grid routing reliability. We present a simulation of our proposed scheme using ns-3 simulation software, and prove that our method can improve smart grid reliability.

Channel Access and Power Control for Energy-Efficient Delay-Aware Heterogeneous Cellular Networks for Smart Grid Communications Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Cellular technology with long-term evolution (LTE)-based standards is a preferable choice for smart grid neighborhood area networks due to its high availability and scalability. However, the integration of cellular networks and smart grid communications puts forth a significant challenge due to the simultaneous transmission of real-time smart grid data which could cause radio access network (RAN) congestions. Heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets) have been proposed to improve the performance of LTE because HetNets can alleviate RAN congestions by off-loading access attempts from a macrocell to small cells. In this paper, we study energy efficiency and delay problems in HetNets for transmitting smart grid data with different delay requirements. We propose a distributed channel access and power control scheme, and develop a learning-based approach for the phasor measurement units (PMUs) to transmit data successfully by considering interference and signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraints. In particular, we exploit a deep reinforcement learning(DRL)-based method to train the PMUs to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the earned reward of successful transmissions without having knowledge on the system dynamics. Results show that the DRL approach obtains good performance without knowing the system dynamic beforehand and outperforms the Gittin index policy in different normal ratios, minimum SINR requirements and number of users in the cell.

A Joint Multi-Path and Multi-Channel Protocol for Traffic Routing in Smart Grid Neighborhood Area Networks.

In order to improve the management mechanisms of the electric energy transport infrastructures, the smart grid networks have associated data networks that are responsible for transporting the necessary information between the different elements of the electricity network and the control center. Besides, they make possible a more efficient use of this type of energy. Part of these data networks is comprised of the Neighborhood Area Networks (NANs), which are responsible for interconnecting the different smart meters and other possible devices present at the consumers’ premises with the control center. Among the proposed network technologies for NANs, wireless technologies are becoming more relevant due to their flexibility and increasing available bandwidth. In this paper, some general modifications are proposed for the routing protocol of the wireless multi-hop mesh networks standardized by the IEEE. In particular, the possibility of using multiple paths and transmission channels at the same time, depending on the quality of service needs of the different network traffic, is added. The proposed modifications have been implemented in the ns-3 simulator and evaluated in situations of high traffic load. Simulation results show improvements in the network performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, throughput and network transit time.

A Highly Reliable and Efficient-Route-Recovery Routing Algorithm for Smart Grid Neighborhood Area Networks

In Smart Grid Communication Networks (SGCNs), the Neighborhood Area Networks (NANs) locates in the middle place and transmits data up and down. The NAN routing algorithm is the key technology to determine the quality and efficiency of SGCNs communication services. Hybrid wireless mesh protocol (HWMP) is available for NAN, but not perfect. This paper explores the route recovery mechanism of HWMP and put up some improvements to it. Combined with our research on routing metric of HWMP, a new improved routing algorithm HR-HWMP is proposed in this paper. NS3 is used to simulate the performance of HR-HWMP. The results show that the performance in the packet transmission rate and network throughput has been improved.

Cost- and reliability-oriented aggregation point association in long-term evolution and passive optical network hybrid access infrastructure for smart grid neighborhood area network

With the rapid development of the smart grid, the data aggregation point (AP) in the neighborhood area network (NAN) is becoming increasingly important for forwarding the information between the home area network and wide area network. Due to limited budget, it is unable to use one-single access technology to meet the ongoing requirements on AP coverage. This paper first introduces the wired and wireless hybrid access network with the integration of long-term evolution (LTE) and passive optical network (PON) system for NAN, which allows a good trade-off among cost, flexibility, and reliability. Then, based on the already existing wireless LTE network, an AP association optimization model is proposed to make the PON serve as many APs as possible, considering both the economic efficiency and network reliability. Moreover, since the features of the constraints and variables of this NP-hard problem, a hybrid intelligent optimization algorithm is proposed, which is achieved by the mixture of the genetic, ant colony and dynamic greedy algorithm. By comparing with other published methods, simulation results verify the performance of the proposed method in improving the AP coverage and the performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of convergence.

QoS metrics modeling and analysis for neighborhood area network in smart grid applications

Recently, planning and designing of smart‐grid (SG) neighborhood area network (NAN) communication architecture has drawn wide attention of researchers. In order to establish an SG NAN scheme satisfying the requirement, a quality of service (QoS) metric is a critical demand. However, there are few studies on the implementation of an efficient QoS metric model. In this paper, we propose an innovative QoS metric model for SG NAN design. By exploring the natural characteristics of SG messages in many applications, we choose the reliability and latency of a message as the most important criteria and implement the QoS curve for evaluating the performance of any candidate communication scheme. In addition, we present the evaluation model for QoS metrics of multiple SG services in NAN. Compared to other existing QoS methods, our model is easy to use and helps to reduce the time and cost in the planning and designing of a NAN for SG. Simulation and analysis results indicate good agreement with our proposed QoS model. © 2017 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley &amp; Sons, Inc.

Dynamic Spectrum Sharing for the Coexistence of Smart Utility Networks and WLANs in Smart Grid Communications

A smart utility network (SUN), as defined in the IEEE 802.15.4g standard, is an emerging technology enabling reliable data transmissions in smart grid (SG) neighbourhood area networks. However, a SUN operates on unlicensed bands that are overlapped with most of the channels of wireless local area networks (WLANs). Thus, it is critical to investigate the coexistence issues for SUNs and WLANs in SG. This article aims to propose a dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) coexistence scheme working with cognitive radio techniques, including the designs of network topology and channel detection/allocation schemes. We also establish Markov chain models based on channel state transitions for the proposed schemes, which are used to analyze network performance from the viewpoint of SUN services. The analytical results show that a channel reservation strategy is critical to ensure satisfactory performance of SUNs.

Provisioning required reliability of wireless data communication in smart grid neighborhood area networks

A possible candidate for implementing smart grid neighborhood area network (NAN) is wireless communications because of its advantages, such as flexibility and low installation and maintenance cost. However, one of the problems with wireless communication is its unreliability, whereas communication reliability is a basic requirement of smart grid applications. In this paper, we consider a wireless mesh network for NAN and then propose a method on the basis of hop-by-hop ARQ that achieves the required data communication reliability in wireless NAN and, at the same time, satisfies the communication latency constraint which is another requirement of smart grid applications. The proposed approach provides the optimal number of allowed retransmissions at each hop considering the loss probabilities of all hops and end-to-end delay constraint. Comparing to the typical application of ARQ in which the number of retransmissions permitted is the same at each hop, it is demonstrated that the proposed approach achieves a higher level of reliability while meeting the delay constraint. Moreover, the proposed method is evaluated by simulation, and the results are consistent with the results of the theoretical model.

SCTP-aware Link Layer Retransmission Mechanism for Smart-grid Communication Network

The smart grid delivers electricity from suppliers to consumers and uses bidirectional communication to exchange real-time information between supply system and smart meters at the user end. With a combined communication infrastructure, smart grid manages the operation of all associated components to provide reliable and supportable electricity supply. The Neighborhood Area Network (NAN) of smart grid supports bi-directional data transfer between smart meters (installed at customer premises) and control center of the utility company through an aggregator. This communication suffers low throughput and excessive delays due to the Head of Line (HOL) blocking when the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is implemented for reliability. In this paper we propose SCTP-aware Link Layer Retransmission mechanism (SCTP-LLR) which augments the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) with Link Layer Retransmissions at the aggregator. SCTP-LLR uses the multi-streaming feature offered by SCTP and implements link layer retransmissions at the aggregator to mitigate the effect of HOL blocking. We carried out simulations using Network Simulator and compared the performance of SCTP-LLR against TCP and SCTP. Our results show that SCTP-LLR outperforms both TCP and SCTP in terms of throughput and packet delays and is a promising protocol to be implemented in smart grid NAN for reliable and efficient communication.