A secure network management protocol for SmartGrid BPL networks: Design, implementation and experimental results

This paper proposes a secure device management protocol mainly targeted to large-scale Broadband over Power Line (BPL) networks. In the context of the management patterns implied by the Smart Grid concept, the control protocol is based on the Intel Universal Plug and Play platform. To improve system scalability, a novel data aggregation algorithm has been proposed, while system security is ensured using a variation of the Rijndael algorithm and hosted in a custom Linux environment. Through appropriate simulations, the boundaries of the protocol performance have been investigated. The numerical results verified that the proposed network management protocol is secure, fast and may be used effectively to remotely manage a large-scale BPL network.