Enhancing Security of Advanced Metering Infrastructure by Introducing Threshold Attendance Protocol

The industry pushes towards Smart grid systems in order to resolve current limitations of the unidirectional legacy power grid infrastructure. By introducing Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) as an integral part of the Smart grid solution, the utility company obtains an invaluable tool to optimize its network, lower the operational costs, and improve quality of service. Unfortunately, introducing two-way communication poses a security risk to the power grid infrastructure. In this paper the authors consider a Threshold Attendance Protocol (TAP) acting in a reverted security paradigm. Its main idea is to keep the network load at a predictable level at all times. To achieve that, TAP in AMI environment is embedded and the solution using real-life simulation parameters is validated.