Comparative evaluation of Smart Grid AMI networks: Performance under privacy

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is an indispensable part of a Smart Grid (SG) initiative. AMI applications collect data measured by smart meters in the SG. This process may leak information about consumers. In this paper, we build an IEEE 802.11s-based SG AMI network testbed consisting of Beaglebone Black boards and investigate the performance of privacy-preserving protocols in real-life and compare it with the ns-3 simulations. We develop an application that collects data periodically. This mechanism runs in two modes: Hop-by-hop and end-to-end aggregation. The application is tested on TCP and UDP. We use Paillier cryptosystem for privacy, and ECDSA for authentication. The application is also simulated in ns-3. The testbed results are compared with the ns-3 results in terms of packet delivery ratio, throughput and data collection completion time. Comparison showed that the tested privacy-preserving protocol behavior may not accurately reflect that of ns-3, especially with data completion time metric.