The Internet of Things (IoT) is the next era of communication. Using the IoT, physical objects can be empowered to create, receive, and exchange data in a seamless manner. Various IoT applications focus on automating different tasks and are trying to empower the inanimate physical objects to act without any human intervention. The existing and upcoming IoT applications are highly promising to increase the level of comfort, efficiency, and automation for the users. To be able to implement such a world in an ever-growing fashion requires high security, privacy, authentication, and recovery from attacks. In this regard, it is imperative to make the required changes in the architecture of the IoT applications for achieving end-to-end secure IoT environments. In this paper, a detailed review of the security-related challenges and sources of threat in the IoT applications is presented. After discussing the security issues, various emerging and existing technologies focused on achieving a high degree of trust in the IoT applications are discussed. Four different technologies, blockchain, fog computing, edge computing, and machine learning, to increase the level of security in IoT are discussed.

/pdf/a-survey-on-iot-security-application-areas-security-threats-1gb31j78px.pdf

A Survey on IoT Security: Application Areas, Security Threats, and Solution Architectures

Electrifying transportation is a promising approach to alleviate the climate change issue. The adoption of electric vehicle into market has introduced significant impacts on various fields, especially the power grid. Various policies have been implemented to foster the electric vehicle deployment and the increasing trend of electric vehicle adoption in the recent years has been satisfying. The continual development of electric vehicle power train, battery and charger technologies have further improved the electric vehicle technologies for wider uptake. Despite the environmental and economical benefits, electric vehicles charging introduce negative impacts on the existing network operation. Appropriate charging management strategies can be implemented to cater for this issue. Furthermore, electric vehicle integration in the smart grid can bring many potential opportunities, especially from the perspective of vehicle-to-grid technology and as the solution for the renewable energy intermittency issue. This paper reviews the latest development in electric vehicle technologies, impacts of electric vehicle roll out and opportunities brought by electric vehicle deployment.

A review on the state-of-the-art technologies of electric vehicle, its impacts and prospects

Communication network requirements for major smart grid applications in HAN, NAN and WAN

Smart grid has modernized the way electricity is generated, transported, distributed, and consumed by integrating advanced sensing, communications, and control in the day-to-day operation of the grid. Electricity is a core utility for the functioning of society and for the services provided by information and communication technologies (ICTs). Several concepts of the smart grid, such as dynamic pricing, distributed generation, and demand management, have significantly impacted the operation of ICT services, in particular, communication networks and data centers. Ongoing energy-efficiency and operational expenditures reduction efforts in communication networks and data centers have gained another dimension with those smart grid concepts. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on the smart grid-driven approaches in energy-efficient communications and data centers, and the interaction between smart grid and information and communication infrastructures. Although the studies on smart grid, energy-efficient communications, and green data centers have been separately surveyed in previous studies, to this end, research that falls in the intersection of those fields has not been properly classified and surveyed yet. We start our survey by providing background information on the smart grid and continue with surveying smart grid-driven approaches in energy-efficient communication systems, followed by energy, cost and emission minimizing approaches in data centers, and the corresponding cloud network infrastructure. We discuss the open issues in smart grid-driven approaches in ICTs and point some important research directions such as the distributed renewable energy generation capability-coupled communication infrastructures, optimum energy-efficient network design for the smart grid environment, the impact of green communication techniques on the reliability and latency requirements of smart grid data, workload consolidation with smart grid-awareness, and many more.

Energy-Efficient Information and Communication Infrastructures in the Smart Grid: A Survey on Interactions and Open Issues

Review: The role of communication systems in smart grids: Architectures, technical solutions and research challenges

Compared to the conventional grid, the smart grid requires active participation of consumers to improve the quality and reliability of power delivery. The increase in consumer participation is expected from the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), commonly known as the smart meter, which has the capability of supporting various functions beyond that of recording energy usage. One of the primary objectives of the AMI is to allow load and cost management for the utility. This is envisioned partly through a communication system implemented between the smart meter and consumer equipment, currently deployed using wireless networking solutions such as ZigBee. Due to the shared nature of the wireless medium, however, these deployments face security challenges and interference issues, which must be addressed, taking into account the interests of both the utility company and the consumer. This work takes a comprehensive look at wireless security in the smart-meter-based home area network scenario and identifies possible vulnerabilities. Subsequently, some countermeasures are developed that can be used by both the utility company and the customer and are integrated into a common framework called SecureHAN that can be agreed to by both. In addition, the experiences from implementing the SecureHAN framework using commercial off-the-shelf hardware are described, including possible challenges.

Toward a Secure Wireless-Based Home Area Network for Metering in Smart Grids

Smart grid technology places greater demands for reliability on communications infrastructure. This work focuses on identifying requirements for distribution feeder level communications. Due to the large number of distribution components connected to the distribution level feeders, a massively deployed wireless communication network is identified as the potential technology for this application. This network would allow prioritized communication: high priority for abnormal events and system control operations, and low priority communication for asset management tasks. A three-layer wireless communication architecture is proposed in this work to increase the reliability and reduce the latency of event notification. Fault location is considered as an example application to illustrate the proposed architecture.

Wireless communication for smart grid applications at distribution level — Feasibility and requirements

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) initiatives are a popular tool to incorporate changes for modernizing the electricity grid, reduce peak loads, and meet energy efficiency targets. There is the looming issue of how to communicate and handle consumer data collected by electric utilities and manage limited communication network resources. Several data relay points are required to collect data distributedly and send them through a communication backhaul. This paper studies the smart meter message concatenation (SMMC) problem of how to efficiently concatenate multiple small smart metering messages arriving at data concentrator units in order to reduce protocol overhead and thus network utilization. This problem needs to deal with the added constraint that each originating message from its source may have its own stated deadline that must be taken into account during the concatenation process. This paper provides hardness results for the SMMC problem, and proposes six heuristics and evaluates them to gain a better understanding of the best data volume reduction policies that can be applied at data concentrators of AMI infrastructures. These results are further tested for feasibility under practical settings based on aspects, such as network and processing delays, tightness of application deadlines, and lossy backhaul links.

Scalable Meter Data Collection in Smart Grids Through Message Concatenation

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) initiatives are a popular tool to incorporate changes for modernizing the electricity grid, reduce peak loads, and meet energy-efficiency targets. There is the looming issue of how to communicate and handle consumer data collected by electric utilities and manage limited communication network resources. Several data relay points are required to collect data distributedly and send them through a communication backhaul. This work studies the smart meter message concatenation (SMMC) problem of how to concatenate multiple small smart metering messages arriving at data concentrator units (DCUs) in order to reduce protocol overhead and thus network utilization. This problem needs to deal with the added constraint that each originating message from its source may have its own stated deadline that must be taken into account during the concatenation process. Six heuristic algorithms are proposed and evaluated to gain a better understanding of the best data volume reduction policies that can be applied at data concentrators of smart grids.

On the scalable collection of metering data in smart grids through message concatenation

Many application scenarios envisioned as part of the “smarter” grid depend on an effective underlying communication infrastructure for power distribution. The advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is one such application scenario where bidirectional communication between electric meters of customers and the utility control center is required for demand response and load control. Several technologies have been suggested to meet communication needs for the backhaul that connects customer data collection points with the utility's control center. In this paper, these technologies are compared with a justification of why wireless communication technologies may be most suitable for the backhaul. A linear chain multihop wireless communication architecture is then proposed, and its ability to meet application requirements of the communication backhaul is evaluated through simulations. Based on capacity limitations first seen in the simulation results, a theoretical analysis is done to understand the data carrying capacity of using linear chain wireless technologies for the communication backhaul. Finally, the AMI application scenario is used as a case study to understand the implications of any limitations imposed by the proposed communication architecture.

Babak Karimi

Papers

Toward a Secure Wireless-Based Home Area Network for Metering in Smart Grids

Wireless communication for smart grid applications at distribution level — Feasibility and requirements

Scalable Meter Data Collection in Smart Grids Through Message Concatenation

On the scalable collection of metering data in smart grids through message concatenation

On the Capacity of a Wireless Backhaul for the Distribution Level of the Smart Grid