SSGMT: A Secure Smart Grid Monitoring Technique

Abstract: Critical infrastructure systems like power grid require an improved critical in-formation infrastructure (CII) that can not only help in monitoring of the crit-ical entities but also take part in failure analysis and self-healing. Efficient designing of a CII is challenging as each kind of communication technology has its own advantages and disadvantages. Wired networks are highly scala-ble and secure, but they are neither cost effective nor dynamic in nature. Wireless communication technologies on the other hand are easy to deploy, low cost etc. but they are vulnerable to cyber-attacks. In order to optimize cost, power consumption, dynamic nature, accuracy and scalability a hybrid communication network is designed in this paper where a portion of the communication network is built using wireless sensor networks (WSN) and the rest is a wired network of fiber optic channels. To offer seamless opera-tion of the hybrid communication network and provide security a Secure Smart Grid Monitoring Technique (SSGMT) is also proposed. The perfor-mance of the proposed hybrid CII for the generation and transmission sys-tem of power grid coupled with the SSGMT during different cyber-attacks is tested using NS2 simulator. The simulation results show that the SSGMT for a joint power communication network of IEEE 118-Bus system performs better than the prevailing wireless CIIs like Lo-ADI and Modified AODV.