Secure Communication Architecture for Dynamic Energy Management in Smart Grid

Smart grid takes advantage of communication technologies for efficient energy management and utilization. It entails sacrifice from consumers in terms of reducing load during peak hours by using dynamic energy pricing model. To enable active participation of consumers in load management, the concept Home Energy Gateway (HEG) has recently been proposed in literature. However, the HEG concept is rather new and literature still lacks to address challenges related to data representation, seamless discovery, interoperability, security and privacy.
This paper presents the design of a communication framework that effectively copes with the interoperability and integration challenges between devices from different manufacturers. The proposed communication framework offers seamless auto-discovery and zero-configuration based networking between heterogeneous devices at consumer sites. It uses elliptic curve based security mechanism for protecting consumers privacy and providing best possible shield against different types of cyber-attacks. Experiments in real networking environment validated that the proposed communication framework is lightweight, secure, portable with low bandwidth requirement and flexible to be adopted for dynamic energy management in smart grid.