Placement of primary-secondary trust nodes in smart grid communication network

The communication network of the smart grid needs to be secure as well as efficient. Trust nodes can be deployed in the communication network to provide the necessary security protection. However, the mechanism should support self-recovery in case that one or more trust nodes stop working. Moreover, the runtime recovery shall be time efficient so as to meet the time constraints in the communications between the components in the smart grid. This paper proposes the Primary-Secondary trust node placement algorithm (P-S algorithm) to identify the set of primary and secondary trust nodes to address the above issue. In case of faults, secondary trust nodes will be activated immediately to avoid the cost of identifying the alternative trust nodes during runtime. Comparisons between the original trust node placement and the proposed P-S algorithm are performed based on a network under different tolerant levels. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach is effective in providing the security of the smart grid system with the low overall cost.