An Approach to Secure Mobile Agents in Automatic Meter Reading

Mobile agent is a suitable paradigm to collect information from multiple sites in a distributed environment. As compare to other technologies, mobile agents can be used beneficially for Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) and to measure power quality information at each energy meter. Since meter contains embedded system, so the choice of agent platform for such an application is very important. This article investigates different methods from literature that use mobile agent paradigm for AMR process. It proposes a method that reduces the total security computation cost which is incurred in AMR process. In this method, energy meters are organized in the form of a group based upon the geographical location. In such one location energy meters perform their jobs under a security manager. In this method, the concept of local mobile agent is proposed to avoid the visit of external mobile agent to energy meters directly. Local mobile agent carries the acceptable queries from security manager and visits energy meters. This article uses mathematical modeling to represent the security computation cost incurred by each method from literature and compare it with the propose method. It is concluded that the proposed mechanism reduces the security computation cost considerably, compared to other methods.