Cognitive Radio for Smart Grid: A Decentralized Emergency Management Approach

With the remarkable advancements in wireless technology, the scarcity of the available spectrum has become more severe. Cognitive Radio (CR) technology is introduced as an emerging solution to alleviate the imbalance between spectrum under-utilization and high spectrum demands. CR enables unlicensed users to opportunistically transmit data through spectrum holes in licensed bands. In the context of smart grids, CR has become a key component to improve communication efficiency and spectrum usage. In particular emergency situations, some nodes are prone to failure, however the network must remain connected to the designated destination. In addition, the generated emergency communication and disaster relief cause high load of traffic that in turn will lead to congestion and affect the network coverage and capacity. In this paper, we introduced an efficient CR-based architecture for Smart Grid networks to enhance capacity coverage and scalability in the disaster and emergency case. The architecture is decentralized and consists of a set of clusters that communicate with each other in a secure way through number of gateways. CRT-based group key management has been used to manage the distribution of keys between gateways. In addition, the asymmetric encryption will assure the confidentiality of transmitted packets.