A Fair and Secure Bandwidth Allocation for AMI Mesh Network in Smart Grid

Abstract

Great interest and much research have emerged to implement and improve the smart grid. Even though the communication network realizes or improves end-to-end smartness at every part of the smart grid, the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) enhances the smartness more effectively by enabling a two-way communication between customers and the Control Center. We have many possible solutions for the underlying networks for the AMI system, and yet, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) draw much attention in the community because of their flexibility and robustness. One of the most important issues to consider is how to solve the well-known bottleneck problem of WMNs. In this paper, we propose the E-fee scheme to securely protect the collaboration among nodes in the AMI system when WMNs are employed as the underlying network of the system. Then we conduct a theoretical analysis on the protection capability and we also see the results of a performance evaluation study to verify if the E-fee scheme can address the problem. The results indicate that the E-fee scheme is a secure and fair bandwidth allocation technique for the AMI system based on WMSs.