Secure and Fault-tolerant Advanced Metering Infrastructure

A Smart grid consists of many digital operations that bring the grid into an intelligent system. One of the key components in the smart grid is the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). AMI helps to acquire the data from Interface Energy Meters (IEMs), which are geographically dispersed across substations. AMI includes Interface Energy Meters, data concentrator units, IT infrastructure and various communication mediums for meter data transfer like Power-line communication carries (PLCC), Fiber Optics, Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT), GSM/GPRS/3G/4G, etc. Instantaneous profile, event profile, load profile and billing profile of meter data is used for load and renewable energy forecasting, scheduling, outage management, power system planning and efficient management of power grid. Any fault/error in AMI components leads to data unavailability. The Communication between the IEMs and control center is vulnerable for various communication channel attacks like meter spoofing attack, authentication attacks, Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks, reply attacks, etc. High availability, reliability and integrity of meter data are a need of the hour for efficient management of power systems operations. The proposed solution helps to achieve fault-tolerant AMI with high-secure data communication between IEMs and control centers by retaining interoperability.