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

Towards transnational interoperable PPDR communications: the European ISI cloud network

The European Council has been stressing the need for interoperability among technologies used for Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) communications across Europe for a long time. Nevertheless, while the introduction of TETRA and TETRAPOL technologies in the last two decades has increased the possibility to talk cross agency internally in a country, cross border communication for the public safety forces is not well solved as of today. This paper describes the communications interoperability solution that is being developed in the framework of the ISITEP project. This solution, referred to as the European Inter-System Interface (ISI) Cloud Network, aims to integrate the PPDR national/regional infrastructures to allow migration (i.e., roaming) and communication services between networks within a secure framework. The ISI Cloud Network involves, among other components, the specification of a new ISI interface to be deployed over IP transport networks and the development of a number of different gateways to cover the use of TETRA and TETRAPOL technologies as well as the use of legacy TETRA ISI by some networks.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Transitioning from analog to digital communications: An information security perspective

A summary is given of the government's perspective on evolving digital communications as they affect secure voice users and approaches for operating during a transition period to an all digital world. An integrated architecture and a mobile satellite interface are discussed

Pattern-driven security, privacy, dependability and interoperability management of iot environments

Achieving Security, Privacy, Dependability and Interoperability (SPDI) is of paramount importance for the ubiquitous deployment and impact maximization of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Nevertheless, said requirements are not only difficult to achieve at system initialization, but also hard to prove and maintain at run-time. This paper highlights an approach to tackling the above challenges, through the definition of pattern language and a framework that can guarantee SPDI in IoT orchestrations. By integrating pattern reasoning engines at the various layers of the IoT infrastructure, and a machine-processable representation of said pattern through Drools rules, the proposed framework can provide ways to fulfill SPDI requirements at design time, and also provide the means to guarantee those SPDI properties and manage the orchestrations accordingly. Moreover, an application example of the framework is presented in an Industrial IoT monitoring environment

Smart Grid Communications: Overview of Research Challenges, Solutions, and Standardization Activities

Optimization of energy consumption in future intelligent energy networks (or Smart Grids) will be based on grid-integrated near-real-time communications between various grid elements in generation, transmission, distribution and loads. This paper discusses some of the challenges and opportunities of communications research in the areas of smart grid and smart metering. In particular, we focus on some of the key communications challenges for realizing interoperable and future-proof smart grid/metering networks, smart grid security and privacy, and how some of the existing networking technologies can be applied to energy management. Finally, we also discuss the coordinated standardization efforts in Europe to harmonize communications standards and protocols.Comment: To be published in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Semantic Gateway as a Service architecture for IoT Interoperability

The Internet of Things (IoT) is set to occupy a substantial component of future Internet. The IoT connects sensors and devices that record physical observations to applications and services of the Internet. As a successor to technologies such as RFID and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), the IoT has stumbled into vertical silos of proprietary systems, providing little or no interoperability with similar systems. As the IoT represents future state of the Internet, an intelligent and scalable architecture is required to provide connectivity between these silos, enabling discovery of physical sensors and interpretation of messages between things. This paper proposes a gateway and Semantic Web enabled IoT architecture to provide interoperability between systems using established communication and data standards. The Semantic Gateway as Service (SGS) allows translation between messaging protocols such as XMPP, CoAP and MQTT via a multi-protocol proxy architecture. Utilization of broadly accepted specifications such as W3C's Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontology for semantic annotations of sensor data provide semantic interoperability between messages and support semantic reasoning to obtain higher-level actionable knowledge from low-level sensor data.Comment: 16 page

Internet of Things-aided Smart Grid: Technologies, Architectures, Applications, Prototypes, and Future Research Directions

Traditional power grids are being transformed into Smart Grids (SGs) to address the issues in existing power system due to uni-directional information flow, energy wastage, growing energy demand, reliability and security. SGs offer bi-directional energy flow between service providers and consumers, involving power generation, transmission, distribution and utilization systems. SGs employ various devices for the monitoring, analysis and control of the grid, deployed at power plants, distribution centers and in consumers' premises in a very large number. Hence, an SG requires connectivity, automation and the tracking of such devices. This is achieved with the help of Internet of Things (IoT). IoT helps SG systems to support various network functions throughout the generation, transmission, distribution and consumption of energy by incorporating IoT devices (such as sensors, actuators and smart meters), as well as by providing the connectivity, automation and tracking for such devices. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on IoT-aided SG systems, which includes the existing architectures, applications and prototypes of IoT-aided SG systems. This survey also highlights the open issues, challenges and future research directions for IoT-aided SG systems

IETF standardization in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT): a survey

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities

Privacy In The Smart Grid: An Information Flow Analysis

Project Final Report prepared for CIEE and California Energy Commissio