Research on Application of Wireless Bridge Technology in the Smart Grid

The construction of smart grid, in the meet of communication network core layer must have the strong bearing capacity and the strong network frame, also requires the access layer have the wide variety and flexible edge access ability. In this article, in accordance with the technical features of the smart grid communication network, combined with the Global Energy Interconnection to the requirement of all kinds of communication. The wireless bridge system based on the IEEE 802.11 series protocol as flexible edge access is applied to the smart grid communications, to forward the power wireless bridge structure design and the bridge monitoring management platform design and safety protection design. The use of a wireless bridge will increase the transmission quality of signal, distance and the safety of the transmission. In this article, the wireless bridge in the application of the smart grid electric power communication network has a role in promoting, has a guiding significance to the construction of the smart grid communication.

Communications Technologies for Smart Grid Applications

Smart grid is a modern power grid infrastructure for improved efficiency, reliability, and safety, with smooth integration of renewable and alternative energy sources, through automated control and modern communications technologies. The smart grid offers several advantages over traditional power grids such as reduced operational costs and opening new markets to utility providers, direct communication with customer premises through advanced metering infrastructure, self-healing in case of power drops or outage, providing security against several types of attacks, and preserving power quality by increasing link quality. Typically, a heterogeneous set of networking technologies is found in the smart grid. In this chapter, smart grid communications technologies along with their advantages and disadvantages are explained. Moreover, research challenges and open research issues are provided.

Denial of Service Attack on Protocols for Smart Grid Communications

In this work, a denial of service (DoS) attack known as the clogging attack has been performed on three different modern protocols for smart grid (SG) communications. The first protocol provides authentication between smart meters (SM) and a security and authentication server (SAS). The second protocol facilitates secure and private communications between electric vehicles (EV) and the smart grid. The third protocol is a secure and efficient key distribution protocol for the smart grid. The protocols differ in either their applications (authentication, key distribution), or their ways of communications (usage of encryption, hashes, timestamps etc.). But they are similar in their purpose of design (for the smart grid) and their usage of computationally intensive mathematical operations (modular exponentiation, ECC) to implement security. Solutions to protect these protocols against this attack are then illustrated along with identifying the causes behind the occurrence of this vulnerability in SG communication protocols in general.