An Agent-Administrator-based Security Mechanism for Distributed Sensors and Drones for Smart Grid Monitoring

摘要

Distributed sensors are the eyes and ears of a smart grid which provide information vital for monitoringand controlling the entire power generation, transmission, and distribution systems. Secure exchange of informationamong the sensing and decision-making entities is essential as failures may bring the entire system on its knees. Withthe rapid growth in the number of distributed sensors, drones have a myriad of applications. A swarm of dronescould also be deployed in war zones and disaster-stricken areas where a secured intercommunication is of paramountimportance for survivability and for successful mission completion. In this paper, a secure mechanism is proposedbased on mobile agents to secure information exchange with minimum overhead. An Agent Administrator (AA)automatically clones and sends a secure mobile agent (SMA) to the target sensors or drones to scan and check theirsecurity status. Then, the dispatched SMAs send feedbacks to the server AA or other members. In case of sensors, theclosest terminal unit to which the sensors are directly connected is designated as an AA, which is capable of checkingauthentication and scanning for vulnerabilities. In the case of drones, any one of them or multiple of them couldbe designated as the AA and the flagged feedback is broadcast to all other nodes or drones thereby providing themsecurity status updates. A modified Nagle’s Algorithm is also proposed to support real-time video transmission. Theexperimental results validate the effectiveness and convenience of the proposed system.