SecLoRa: A Secure LoRa Based Communication System for Residential Smart-grids

With technological advancements in urban and suburban areas, the need for a smart management system for electricity consumption increases. A smart-grid system offers a solution to manage the shift to more sustainable technologies such as microgrids. A smart-grid connects the electrical grids with a communication system that enables a two-way flow of information, building a widely distributed intelligent and automated energy delivery system. One of the key functions of smart-grid, and smart metering to enable the substation automation system (SAS) to get meter readings remotely and on time. In such systems, secure communication and data privacy questions have been prudent issues since large-scale communication networks will connect numerous geographically distributed devices. Thus, a robust, low-power, and secure communication system become necessary. In this paper, we evaluate the applicability of LoRa technology for building a communication system in a smart grid. We implement and test a LoRa-based peer-to-peer, encrypted, and long-range communication system to enable two-way communication and present numerical estimations for a mesh network that extends the communication range through multi-hop communication. The experimental results reflect the suitability of the proposed system for implementing a secure residential smart-grid.