A secure and reliable in-network collaborative communication scheme for advanced metering infrastructure in smart grid

We consider various security vulnerabilities of deploying Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) in smart grid, and explore the issues related to confidentiality for customer privacy and customer behavior as well as message authentication for meter reading and control messages. There are only a very few research work on AMI authentications, and no work exists on confidentiality for user privacy and user behavior, from the best of our knowledge. In this paper, we propose an in-network collaborative scheme to provide secure and reliable AMI communications in smart grid, with smart meters interconnected through a multihop wireless network. In this approach, an AMI system can provide trust services, data privacy and integrity by mutual authentications whenever a new smart meter initiates and joins the smart grid AMI network. Data integrity and confidentiality are fulfilled through message authentication and encryption services respectively using the corresponding keys established in the mutual authentications. A transmission scheme is proposed to facilitate the data collection and management message delivery between smart meters and a local collector for AMI communications. Simulation results show that the proposed method has a better end-to-end delay and packet losses comparing with a basic security method, and the proposed method can provide secure and reliable communications for AMI in smart grid systems.