SeDAX: A Scalable, Resilient, and Secure Platform for Smart Grid Communications

Smart Grid applications are imposing challenging requirements of security and reliability on the N-way communication infrastructure being designed to support multiple grid applications. These challenges stem from the increasing incorporation of distributed renewable energy sources on to the grid, the rising deployment of electric vehicles, and active consumer participation into power grid operations, all of which communicate with the utility control center with varying degrees of priority and security. To address these challenging requirements, we propose SeDAX, a SEcure Data-centric Application eXtensible platform for Smart Grid applications. SeDAX implements scalable, resilient and secure data delivery and data sharing in a wide area network. The platform can scalably handle high volumes of data generated by both applications and sensors. The SeDAX architecture has as its basis a Delaunay Triangulation (DT) network. The properties of the DT graph are leveraged to scalably support secure data-centric (or information-centric) group communication. The primary goals of this platform are to support communication resilience and data availability. The key functional blocks of the SeDAX platform are: (1) a geographic hash forwarding algorithm that operates over the DT graph (DT-GHF), and (2) a DT-based data replication scheme. The forwarding and replication schemes are scalable and cost effective in terms of communication overhead and memory. We describe the design details of the SeDAX platform and present empirical results on the performance of SeDAX as compared with other geometric-based alternatives such as Geographic Hash Table (GHT) forwarding and Content Addressable Networking (CAN). The operation of SeDAX is illustrated in the context of implementing demand response, a known Smart Grid application.