Secure and reliable surveillance over cognitive radio sensor networks in smart grid

In view of recent attacks on smart grid surveillance is of vital importance to enforce surveillance based disaster recovery management operations to ensure seamless energy generation and distribution. The reliability of disaster recovery management depends on availability and privacy preservation of surveillance data. In this paper we propose a reliable privacy preserving smart grid surveillance architecture over cognitive radio sensor networks. Cognitive radio sensor networks are capable of facilitating reliable communications through opportunistic spectrum sensing capabilities as opposed to fixed radio terminal networks based surveillance architectures. The main privacy preserving feature is a novel energy aware physical unclonable function (PUF) based cryptographic key generation method. The proposed solution determines the encryption key length depending on the remaining energy reserve to facilitate data transmission over an expected period of time with minimum channel interferences. Based on the experimental evaluation, the PUF pattern matching based key generation is viable for 32 bits pattern length over a cognitive radio sensor with optimum power utilization and with a probability of reproducibility of a bit pattern (i−p)=0(i−p)=0. We have also performed experiments to validate the reliability model using real-world data. In conclusion, our proposed cognitive radio sensor based solution provide more pragmatic insights in reliability assurances for surveillance in smart grid.