Cooperative Relay Transmission in Advanced Metering Infrastructure with Wireless Attacks

Malicious attacks and coping/defense strategies emerge to be critical issues in the Smart Grid because millions of electronic devices are inter-connected via communication networks throughout critical power facilities. In this paper, we investigate the complex decision making processes between electricity communities that can perform cooperative meter data transmission via relays and a sophisticated wireless attacker that is able to act as jammer and eavesdropper. By designing electricity usage cost functions with consideration of transmission reliability and confidentiality metrics of communities, the interactions among communities and attacker are modeled as a noncooperative game. Then, a learning based algorithm is proposed to reach a mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium, and thus result in stable attacks behavior prediction and corresponding optimal cooperative relay transmission strategies. Simulation results showed that the proposed cooperative relay transmission scheme enables the electricity communities to significantly decrease their expected transmission costs as well as adapts to sophisticated wireless attacks in the Smart Grid.