A secure energy routing mechanism for sharing renewable energy in smart microgrid

Abstract

Due to volatile and rising energy prices, smart microgrids appear to be increasingly popular. Instead of one centrally located power plant, the microgrids will rely on solar panels and wind turbines on every house sharing renewable energy among houses. How to efficiently and optimally share energy is a challenging problem. In order to efficiently share renewable energy, routing protocols in the data network are needed, which introduces another design challenge that is how to feasibly detect and defend the major attacks against routing protocols for smart microgrids. Most of the existing secure routing protocols for other networks (such as ad hoc networks) either ignore the most challenging internal attacks such as spoofed route signaling and fabricated routing messages, or have often produced inefficient security mechanisms. In this paper, we develop a novel secure energy routing mechanism (SERM) for securely and optimally sharing renewable energy in smart microgrids. SERM detects most internal attacks by using message redundancy. The simulation results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed secure energy routing mechanism.