A Secured IoT Scheme for Microgrids Monitoring

A microgrid is a small-scale grid for electricity generation and distribution to small communities using different energy sources such as the sun and the wind. This paper presents a secured IoT scheme to monitor a DC microgrid components for improving its performance. The key idea is to set up a Wireless Sensor Network in which the sensor nodes are connected to a network using the Zigbee protocol and allow external communication through a sink node. A mobile application allows the user to monitor and control the system via the Internet to minimize the waste of energy. For security purposes, data are authenticated, encrypted, and decrypted for avoiding malicious attacks. In addition, the sink node has an encrypted key-based protocol for establishing a secured remote login with the authorized users. Also, a firewall and network intrusion detection & prevention system was implemented to protect the devices and their local data. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of this proposed scheme in a real microgrid.