Efficient and Secure Wireless Communications for Advanced Metering Infrastructure in Smart Grids

An experiment is carried out to measure the power consumption of households. The analysis on the real measurement data shows that the significant change of power consumption arrives in a Poisson manner. Based on this experiment, a novel wireless communication scheme is proposed for the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) in smart grid that can significantly improve the spectrum efficiency. The main idea is to transmit only when a significant power consumption change occurs. On the other hand, the policy of transmitting only when change occurs may bring a security issue; i.e., an eavesdropper can monitor the daily life of the house owner, particularly the information of whether the owner is at home. Hence, a defense scheme is proposed to combat this vulnerability by adding artificial spoofing packets. It is shown by numerical results that the defense scheme can effectively prevent the security challenge.