Hardware Demonstration of a Coding-Based Attack Detection/Correction Metering System

Abstract

Power losses in the power grid are categorized into technical and non-technical losses (NTL). NTL include attacking the metering unit, attacking the data of the metering system, or meter malfunctions. A report published in 2017 by a smart infrastructure market intelligence firm estimates the global annual losses due to NTL to be 96 billion US dollars. To reduce the NTL in the distribution systems, deploying a robust NTL detection/correction technique is essential. This work provides a hardware demonstration for a novel coding-based metering system that has been proposed in an earlier work for attack detection and correction. It is worth mentioning that a hardware demonstration/verification for the coding-based metering system has not been reported yet in the literature. The coding-based metering system is based on the Hamming code, which was originally used to detect and correct errors in binary data transmission. It can efficiently detect/correct an attack on smart meters using only very few additional meters. The laboratory testing showed the robustness and effectiveness of the coding-based system.