Location and communication routing optimization of trust nodes in smart grid network infrastructure

The imposed communication network brings more vulnerabilities to the evolving smart grid. Therefore, defensive techniques such as intrusion detection will need to be deployed and used in this already complicated system. Deployment and runtime cost due to the defensive systems will affect the normal function of smart grid system without careful planning and design. This paper is an effort to address this issue. In particular, we apply the set packing algorithm to optimize (minimize) the placement of the trust nodes of the defensive system in the multiple layer architecture of the smart grid. After the trust nodes are placed, a Dijkstra's based optimal routing algorithm is used to find the least cost routing between the communications of the nodes. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach is promising in decreasing the overall cost while keeping the security of the smart grid system.