Secure Communication Architecture for Dynamic Energy Management in Smart Grid

open access articleSmart grid takes advantage of communication technologies for efficient energy management and utilization. It entails sacrifice from consumers in terms of reducing load during peak hours by using a dynamic energy pricing model. To enable an active participation of consumers in load management, the concept of home energy gateway (HEG) has recently been proposed in the literature. However, the HEG concept is rather new, and the literature still lacks to address challenges related to data representation, seamless discovery, interoperability, security, and privacy. This paper presents the design of a communication framework that effectively copes with the interoperability and integration challenges between devices from different manufacturers. The proposed communication framework offers seamless auto-discovery and zero- con figuration-based networking between heterogeneous devices at consumer sites. It uses elliptic-curve-based security mechanism for protecting consumers' privacy and providing the best possible shield against different types of cyberattacks. Experiments in real networking environment validated that the proposed communication framework is lightweight, secure, portable with low-bandwidth requirement, and flexible to be adopted for dynamic energy management in smart grid

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Middleware architectures for the smart grid: A survey on the state-of-the-art, taxonomy and main open issues

The integration of small-scale renewable energy sources in the smart grid depends on several challenges that must be overcome. One of them is the presence of devices with very different characteristics present in the grid or how they can interact among them in terms of interoperability and data sharing. While this issue is usually solved by implementing a middleware layer among the available pieces of equipment in order to hide any hardware heterogeneity and offer the application layer a collection of homogenous resources to access lower levels, the variety and differences among them make the definition of what is needed in each particular case challenging. This paper offers a description of the most prominent middleware architectures for the smart grid and assesses the functionalities they have, considering the performance and features expected from them in the context of this application domain

On the security of software-defined next-generation cellular networks

In the recent years, mobile cellular networks are ndergoing fundamental changes and many established concepts are being revisited. Future 5G network architectures will be designed to employ a wide range of new and emerging technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). These create new virtual network elements each affecting the logic of the network management and operation, enabling the creation of new generation services with substantially higher data rates and lower delays. However, new security challenges and threats are also introduced. Current Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks are not able to accommodate these new trends in a secure and reliable way. At the same time, novel 5G systems have proffered invaluable opportunities of developing novel solutions for attack prevention, management, and recovery. In this paper, first we discuss the main security threats and possible attack vectors in cellular networks. Second, driven by the emerging next-generation cellular networks, we discuss the architectural and functional requirements to enable appropriate levels of security