A Low Power WSNs Attack Detection and Isolation Mechanism for Critical Smart Grid Applications

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are effective tools in many smart grid applications such as remote monitoring, equipment fault diagnostic, wireless advanced metering infrastructure, and residential energy management. WSNs are attractive tools due to their low cost, dynamic nature, ruggedness, and low-power profile. Maintaining a low-power profile is a critical design factor in WSNs. Therefore, implementing sophisticated quality of service protocols and security mechanisms in WSNs is a challenging task. Furthermore, WSNs security mechanisms should not only focus on reducing the power consumption of the sensor devices but also they should maintain high reliability and throughput needed by smart grid applications. In this paper, we present a low-power cyber-security mechanism for WSNs-based smart grid monitoring applications. Our mechanism can detect and isolate various attacks such as the denial of sleep, forge, and replay attacks in an energy efficient way. The simulation results show that our mechanism can outperform existing techniques in power efficiency while maintaining constant delay and reliability values.