A concealed based approach for secure transmission in advanced metering infrastructure

The smart grid has an important subsystem known as the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), responsible for measuring customer consumption of electricity. The AMI subsystem has smart meters as one of the components and they play a vital role in enabling communication between the utility provider and consumers. Smart meters can report real-time electricity consumption readings of the consumer to the utility. Securing this communication link from attacks remain very important for the secure transmission of readings. Different methods or approaches have been developed, and most works have high computational overheads. This paper proposes a lightweight Concealed Based Security Scheme (CBSS) for secure transmission within the AMI, providing authentication, and reducing the computational overheads and energy consumption during transmission. The CBSS method is compared with the AMI Data Communication Scheme (ADCS) which does not have authentication process. The network is built in the Network Simulator 2 environment, showing the communication between the nodes. Further security is provided using a simple encryption/decryption method of 2 random numbers. The contribution of this paper is the proposed lightweight method for the AMI that authenticates the transfer of data between smart meters and other components of the AMI system. The paper also contains a simulation evaluation for the chosen design parameters of the resemblance of AMI network. The simulations show an improvement of 5% in delivery ratio, 3% throughput and 4% in energy consumed when adding security to the network.