Secure smart grid communications and information integration based on digital watermarking in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

As more and more wireless sensor nodes and networks are employed to acquire and transmit the state information of power equipment in smart grid, we are in urgent need of some viable security solutions to ensure secure smart grid communications. Conventional information security solutions, such as encryption/decryption, digital signature and so forth, are not applicable to wireless sensor networks in smart grid any longer, where bulk messages need to be exchanged continuously. The reason is that these cryptographic solutions will account for a large portion of the extremely limited resources on sensor nodes. In this article, a security solution based on digital watermarking is adopted to achieve the secure communications for wireless sensor networks in smart grid by data and entity authentications at a low cost of operation. Our solution consists of a secure framework of digital watermarking, and two digital watermarking algorithms based on alternating electric current and time window, respectively. Both watermarking algorithms are composed of watermark generation, embedding and detection. The simulation experiments are provided to verify the correctness and practicability of our watermarking algorithms. Additionally, a new cloud-based architecture for the information integration of smart grid is proposed on the basis of our security solutions.

Keywords:

• smart grid
• digital watermarking
• secure communications
• wireless sensor networks
• industrial information integration (III)

Conflict of interest disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 61171075], [grant number 61472294]; and the Visiting Scholarship of State Key Laboratory of Power Transmission Equipment & System Security and New Technology (Chongqing University, China) [grant number 2007DA10512710407].