Routing resilience evaluation for smart metering: Definition, metric and techniques

The operations of smart metering heavily rely on the communication network for efficient data gathering, thus eliminating manual meter reading. Smart electronic devices are deployed in open, unattended and possibly hostile environment such as consumer´s home and office areas, making them particularly vulnerable to physical attacks. Resilience is needed to mitigate such inherent vulnerabilities and risks related to security and reliability. In this article, a general overview of the resilience including definition, metric and resilient techniques relevant for smart metering is presented. A quantitative metric, visual and meaningful, based on the graphical representation is adopted to compare routing protocols in the sense of resilience against active insider attacks. Five well-known routing protocols from the main categories have been studied through simulations and their resilience is evaluated according to the given metric. Resilient techniques introduced to these protocols have enhanced significantly the resilience against attacks providing route diversification.