A Key Management Scheme for Secure Communications of Information Centric Advanced Metering Infrastructure in Smart Grid

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), as the totality of systems and networks to measure, collect, store, analyze, and use energy usage data, is supposed to be the core component in smart grid. In AMI, there are numerous challenges among which cyber security is a major one that needs to be addressed with priority. The information centric networking (ICN) is a promising architecture for the future Internet that disseminates content based on named data instead of named hosts. The congestion control and self-security can enable more scalable, secure, collaborative, and pervasive networking, these make the ICN a potential network architecture for smart grid. This paper aims to apply the ICN approach on AMI system, which we termed as information centric AMI (ICN-AMI). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to distribute contents (or requests for contents) based on ICN in AMI system. Moreover, a simulation-based performance evaluation is employed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed ICN-AMI approach in traffic control for developing AMI system in smart grid. In addition, we proposed a novel key management scheme (KMS) for a large number of smart meters in this system to ensure confidentiality, integrality, and authentication. To validate the scheme, the security analysis, comparisons are done to demonstrate that the proposed information centric KMS (ICN-KMS) is possible and a promising solution for ICN-AMI system.