Secure and privacy-preserving AMI-utility communications via LTE-A networks

In smart grid Automatic Metering Infrastructure (AMI) networks, smart meters should send consumption data to the utility company (UC) for grid state estimation. Creating a new infrastructure to support this communication is costly and may take long time which may delay the deployment of the AMI networks. The Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) networks can be used to support the communications between the AMI networks and the UC. However, since these networks are owned and operated by private companies, the UC cannot ensure the security and privacy of the communications. Moreover, the data sent by the AMI networks have different characteristics and requirements than most of the existing applications in LTE-A networks. For example, there is a strict data delay requirement, data is short and transmitted every short time, data is sent at known/predefined time slots, and there is no handover. In this paper, we study enabling secure and privacy preserving AMI-UC communications via LTE-A networks. The proposed scheme aims to achieve essential security requirements such as authentication, confidentiality, key agreement and data integrity without trusting the LTE-A networks. Furthermore, an aggregation scheme is used to protect the privacy of the electricity consumers. It can also reduce the amount of required bandwidth which can reduce the communication cost. Our evaluations have demonstrated that our proposals are secure and require low communication/computational overhead.