Communication Efficient Merkle-Tree based Authentication Scheme for Smart Grid

A smart grid is a next-generation power grid for managing electricity reports in an advanced way, where each station is associated with a smart meter and each station sends its electricity consumption report to a neighborhood gateway. In this paper, we have proposed the communication efficient Merkle-Tree based authentication scheme for the Smart Grid. The efficiency in case of communication is required to overcome the congestion between stations and the neighborhood gateway because the future smart grid might have been over a million stations hence the congestion between stations and the neighborhood gateway would increase. For reducing the communication cost (unicast) between stations and the neighborhood gateway, we have applied the tree-based group Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol, a common session is shared for all stations including the neighborhood gateway.