Performance evaluation of key management schemes for wireless legacy smart grid environments: poster

With the increasing digitization of different components of Smart Grid, there is an ongoing effort to design secure protocols and deploy them for different applications. A major need along with these efforts is to deal with key management for a large number of devices. While key management can be easily addressed by transferring the existing protocols to Smart Grid domain, this is not an easy task as one needs to deal with the limitations of the current communication infrastructures and resource-constrained devices. As the utilities rightly requests to build the new systems on top of the legacy systems with limited investment, the research community needs to re-think the adaptation of the existing security approaches to such non-traditional environments. This poster aims to tackle one of these problems, namely, symmetric key management in a severely constrained wireless communication environment. Assuming a legacy radio communication infrastructure with bandwidths in the order of kilobits, the objective is to evaluate the feasibility and performance of the existing sophisticated key management protocols. We developed a realistic ns-3 environment and analyze the delay overhead via simulations.