TIGER: A Trust-based Intelligent Geographical Energy-aware Routing for Smart Grid Communication Networks

Smart Grid introduces modern information technologies such as the two-way digital communication networks, the automation control techniques and smart metering into the traditional power grid to provide efficient and intelligent electricity supply services to customers. The wireless mesh network (WMN) technology is a promising infrastructure to underpin and support these smart functionalities flexibly and scalably, and also provide redundant routes to enhance the network availability. However, WMN is vulnerable to some cyber-attacks. The importance of the underlie communication networks in Smart Grid can be analogized as the same criticality as the central nervous system such as brain and the spinal cord in human body, thus these security concerns become most critical and need to be addressed before WMN based Smart Grid becomes a reality. In this paper, we propose a new trust-based routing scheme, named as Trust-based Intelligent Geographical Energy-aware Routing (TIGER), to integrate trust, geographical information, and energy consumption considerations into a novel metric for making routing decision. The extensive simulation studies have confirmed that TIGER algorithms show promises for synthesizing trust, distance and energy factors to effectively detect and avoid malicious attacks in WMN based Smart Grid environment.