1) BROADBAND OVER POWER LINE: AN OVERVIEW

Broadband over Power Line (BPL) communication systems can deliver high-speed voice,
data and video communications to end-users by transmitting radio frequency energy over
existing electrical power lines. Although this technology is not new, the new achievements in
deploying BPL has made it more practical in recent years. The existing infrastructure for BPL is
the most considerable advantage of this technology. Since electrical power lines have reached
mostly all rural areas, BPL technology can provide broadband services in those areas where the
use of other technologies like cable or DSL cannot be justified economically. BPL is also used in
management of power distribution grids by monitoring and facilitating control of them remotely.

 Introduction

The purpose of power line communications is to use power supply system for
communication purpose. The demand for broadband communication is increasing rapidly.
According to KOHL group, less than 30% of US residences and 40% of industries use broadband
services. However these percentages will be doubled within the next 10 years. Currently, there
are several methods to access broadband services. Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) can provide
broadband services mostly in urban areas. Hybrid Fiber Coaxial cable (HFC) is also another
alternative which can provide access to broadband services; however its coverage is much more
limited than DSL. On the other hand Broadband over Power Line (BPL) can provide a vast
coverage for broadband services. This technology can achieve 14 Mbps raw data rate now and it
has the potential for up to 200 Mbps in near future, which makes it competitive with cable and
DSL technology. Also, considering the already deployed infrastructure for this technology
(power lines), the economic aspects of BPL deployment can be justified.

 Worldwide Deployment

Many countries including Australia, Austria, China, Finland, Hong Kong, Hungary,
Ireland, Italy, Korea, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland are currently studying BPL
technology. Internet access via BPL has been archived in Manheim Germany, in Spain by
Endesa and Iberdrola (country’s leading electric utilities) and also in Chile by Enersis the large
electric utility which offers service in Chile, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, and Colombia. In the USA
fully operational commercial broadband services are provided in Manassas Virginia and
Cincinnati, Ohio.

In Canada, Industry Canada monitors related BPL international activities very closely
specially regarding to the potential risks of Access BPL interferences with radio-communication
services. Furthermore, it has started some early assessments of Access BPL technology in
corporation with some other utilities. These assessments are intended to provide a more precise
understanding of the technology and its potential risk for interferences. There are currently no
specific standards to address the deployment of Access BPL systems in Canada. However,
considering lots of similarities between the U.S. and Canadian power distribution systems,
Industry Canada proposes technical harmonization with the USA.

 Background:

Using power lines as a communication medium is not a new idea. The history of power
line communications goes back to 1950, when power lines used as a medium to send a control
messages. This method, which was called Ripple Control was characterized by using low
frequencies (100-900 Hz) giving low bit rates. Also it demanded the use of high power
transmitters in the region of 10 KW. This system first provided unidirectional communication
used for load control and management of street lights. Bidirectional communication was
developed in late1980's and early 1990's. Also use of much higher frequencies and reduction of
signal power were become possible since then.

During recent years several utilities and companies continued to develop the technology
to provide higher bandwidth data transfer across the electric grids in Europe and the U.S.
Advances in Power Line Communication (PLC) technology leaded to BPL which now allows
transfer of broadband data through power lines. The use of GHz range frequencies is anticipated
in near future developments to make the system capable of much higher throughput. (Actually,
an almost new vendor, Corridor Systems, has recently succeeded to develop a method to transfer
data on medium voltage power lines in the range of 100 MHz to 10 GHz.)

 Advantages of BPL

The major claim for BPL is “the infrastructure is already there”. Therefore there is no need
for new major infrastructure as needed for other technologies like HFC or DSL. Another
advantage of BPL technology is its vast geographical coverage. Access BPL technology can
potentially provide broadband services for rural areas which do not have access to such services
now. Where technical and economical issues have limited deployments of cable and DSL, BPL
can provide broadband in many underserved areas. Access BPL can also improve competition in
broadband field by introducing another alternative for broadband. Another interesting aspect of
BPL is its ability to potentially connect all electrical devices in a communicating network. Power
lines reach many unmanned remote locations such as water, oil and gas wells, traffic lights,
subways and cars which can take advantage of this communicating network. Having internet
connection along power lines also facilitates SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data
Acquisition), DSM (Demand-Side Management), and AMR (automated meter reading)
applications for utility companies. In summary, BPL can be compared with HFC cable and DSL
technology as it is shown in table1.
 Comparison HFC Cable DSL BLC
Channel Media Coaxial Cable Twisted Pair Electrical Power Lines
Availability of the Limited availability More availability than The most potentially
Physical Media cable. available media
Typical Capacity 1 Mbps to 6 Mbps 1 Mbps to 6 Mbps 5 Mbps or higher [7]
Connection Type Shared Not-shared Shared
Security Uses Encryption More secure because of Can Use Encryption
having a dedicated
connection.
Typical prices per $39 to $60 $27 to $49 $28 to $39
month
Table 1- Comparison between different broadband access technologies

 Technology

Basically the idea of Power Line Communication is to modulate a radio signal with data and
send it through power lines in a band of frequencies which are not used for supplying electricity.
The used frequencies and the encoding scheme have a significant influence on the efficiency and
the speed of the PLC service. The encoding scheme which is used in BPL is orthogonal
frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). This is a multi-carrier transmission technique which
has been recently recognized as an excellent method for high speed data communication.

The history of OFDM goes back to 1960s, but it has become popular recently since
integrated circuits, which can perform the needed high speed digital operations, became
economically accessible. OFDM is based on the idea of frequency division multiplexing (FDM),
which is a technology that uses multiple frequencies to transmit multiple signals in parallel at the
same time. However, In FDM 50% of the total spectrum is wasted due to guard bands which are
needed between sub-carriers to ensure that they do not overlap.

OFDM is much more spectrally efficient than FDM. It reduces the required bandwidth by
squeezing sub-carriers tightly together until they actually overlap with each other. This is
accomplished by keeping the sub-carriers orthogonal in the complex domain so that they do not
interfere with each other.

The concept of OFDM is shown in figure 1.The generation of orthogonal signals is done by
using an IFFT (inverse fast Fourier transform) block. Using OFDM modulation the data is
injected onto power lines.

Depending on the topology, BPL can be categorized into access BPL or in-house BPL. These
are discussed next.

Access BPL

Access BPL provides internet and other broadband services like voice (IP Telephony), video,
surveillance systems and entertainment (gaming) for homes and offices. In this topology
injectors are used to provide an interface between Internet backbone and the medium voltage
power lines. BPL signals can propagate for 1000 to 3000 feet before they become too distorted
and weak. To transmit the signal for a longer distance repeaters are used to regenerate and
amplify the signal. Extractors are used to provide an interface between end-users and medium-
voltage power lines. Extractors are typically placed at each distribution transformer which
provides low voltage electric power for a group of homes in the area. Some extractors amplify
the BPL signal strength sufficiently to make the transmission of the signal possible through the
distribution transformers. Some others employ couplers to bypass distribution transformers and
relay the signal to the end-users.

Figure 2- Access BPL System

 FCC has provided the following definition for Access BPL: “A carrier current system
installed and operated on an electric utility service as an unintentional radiator that sends radio
frequency energy on frequencies between 1.705 MHz and 80 MHz over medium voltage lines or
low voltage lines to provide broadband communications and is located on the supply side of the
utility service’s points of interconnection with customer premises.”

Industry Canada has suggested that Access BPL systems can be generally classified as either:
(1) an end-to-end system, or (2) a hybrid system [3]. In the end-to-end systems, Access BPL
systems use a combination of medium voltage and low voltage lines or only low voltage lines.
The BPL signal is injected onto medium voltage lines and is transferred to low voltage lines
using couplers or through low voltage transformers and delivered directly to end users. In the
case of low voltage only BPL systems, the signal is injected onto the low voltage lines at the
transformer or the utility meter directly.

On the other hand, in hybrid systems a combination of power lines and wireless transmission
is used. In this scenario the injected BPL signal onto medium voltage lines is extracted and
delivered to the end user by using a wireless channel. Recently another scenario has come up
which is based on capturing a wireless signal and injection of it to low-power lines to be
delivered to the end users. Figure 3 shows an example of an end-to end Access BPL system
while a hybrid BPL system.

Figure 3- Hybrid BPL System

 In-house BPL

FCC has defined In-house BPL as follow: “A carrier current system, operating as an
unintentional radiator, which sends radio frequency energy by conduction over electric power
lines that are not owned, operated or controlled by an electric service provider. The electric
power lines may be aerial (overhead), underground, or inside the walls, floors or ceilings of user
premises. In-house BPL devices may establish closed networks within a user’s premises or
provide connections to Access BPL networks, or both.

Technical Challenges and Research

The main concern about BPL technology is the radio frequency interference (RFI) that it
creates. According to American Radio Relay League (ARRL), BPL systems produce Radio
Frequency Interference within 75 meters for mobile radio and 150 meters for fixed radio. To
reduce the potential RFI, BPL providers need to reduce the transmission power which
consequently increases the number of required repeaters and the cost of the system. Some
vendors claim that they have overcome this issue by using adaptive techniques to notch out the
interfering signals in power lines. On the other hand, Motorola has used a completely different
approach to solve this problem. It uses BPL only on low-voltage power lines and provides the
backhaul wirelessly. According to Motorola, because it uses only low voltage power lines, the
system is less susceptible to interferences.

Moreover, power lines were initially created to deliver electrical power at 50Hz to 60Hz and
behave like low pass filters. Broadband data, which are transmitted at much higher frequencies,
must overcome several obstacles to get through power lines. Attenuation of high frequency
components in power lines is a major concern. On a common power line in the USA, the signal
should be amplified at a distance much less than a mile, which makes the use of repeaters
necessary every 1000 feet to a mile. Communication signals also encounter several levels of
noise on power lines that are generated by connected electrical appliances. Furthermore,
impedance mismatching of connected appliances can result in considerable loss at particular
frequencies (nulls).The location and the depth of these nulls change according to the number and
type of the connected devices to the power network.

Currently, there are two proposed schemes to overcome these issues: using adaptive OFDM
modulation or using multi bit rate OFDM modulation. In both methods good knowledge of
channel characteristics is needed. However, power line channel is has wide sense stationary
properties (channel characteristics slowly change). Therefore, adaptive schemes provide a good
solution because the channel needs to be estimated less frequently. By loading fewer bits at most
affected frequency bands, the total throughput can be improved. This is a beautiful advantage of
multi bit rate OFDM.

In Ryerson University, ADROIT group currently focuses on developing better solutions for
BPL by using adaptive and multi bit rate OFDM. In this scheme the bit rate of each OFDM sub-
carrier can vary based on the channel characteristics. Therefore the sub-carriers with the least
attenuation can deliver the most bit-rate. In other words, by increasing the bandwidth of the sub-
carriers with better channel characteristics, the throughput can be increased. The concept of multi
rate OFDM is shown in figure 4.

Figure 4- Frequency diagram of Multi Rate OFDM

2) SMART GRID WITH CLOUD COMPUTING:

Smart Grid Network (SGN) is one of the innovative trends towards efficient and intelligent
use of the conventional and non-conventional resources of energy with respect to electric power
generation, transmission and distribution. However, with the ever growing dependence and
demand of modern life and industry on electricity, there arises a need of an integrated platform to
manage these services in more efficient, reliable and transparent manner than ever before. In
order to control the entire grid operations in a decentralized manner and analyze huge chunks of
user specific data in an optimized manner, SGNs require dedicated resources. Thus, cloud
computing platform is considered to be novel approach to fulfill these requirements and provide
a more resilient and smarter approach to manage them. To primarily focus on these requirements,
we present the basic architectural model to integrate SGNs with cloud computing technology.
We also present a comprehensive survey on different security issues pertaining to this solution
and the different ways to tackle them.
  Introduction

Smart Grid Networks (SGNs) refer to the electrical grid networks coupled with Information
and Communication Technology in order to support and enhance efficiency, reliability and
transparency across all grid operations. They provide bi-directional mode of communication
between the service providers and the customers, thus providing more centralized control in the
hands of the service and utility providers to regulate the power supply to the end users. Due to
these advantages, SGNs have been successful in replacing the conventional electric grids. Smart
meter - a key component of SGNs are employed in order to gather user specific data pertaining
to their usage and habitual activities. Dynamic change in power usage and supply is supported
with the help of data acquired from these smart meters over a period of time. But with the ever
increasing demand of electricity by almost every strata of modern living, there arises a need to
manage these SGN services in a distributed manner with increased efficiency in terms of energy,
information and security management. Moreover, the large chunks of user specific data
accumulated over a period of time require dedicated resources with respect to storage and
analysis on real time basis. In order to support dynamic demand of power supply, dynamic
availability of resources (data centers, bandwidth, virtual machines) is required too. These
requirements can be gracefully fulfilled with the help of cloud computing platform. Thus,
coupling SGNs with cloud computing seems to be a reasonable solution with respect to catering
the dynamic demand supply of generations of all times.

Researchers around the globe are working in this regard, in order to build a reliable and
sustainable cloud computing platform for supporting smart grid operations. This novel
integration will enhance the present capabilities of electricity generation, transmission and
distribution. This paradigm will help the service producers to efficiently and easily distribute
electricity to the end users and will also ensure the efficient utilization of electric power.

The proposed architecture of smart grid coupled with cloud computing is depicted in
Figure 1. The entire SGN operations could be categorized into three broad phases – generation,
transmission and distribution. The bulk generation of electricity is supported by numerous
renewable and non-renewable power plants i.e. solar farms, wind farms, thermal and hydro
power plants etc. The cloud considered in this case, could either be private or public cloud
depending upon on the requirements and investments in the scope of the service providers. SGNs
are characterized by smart meters that are deployed in user’s premises. These devices are capable
of gathering the power usage data specific to end users and then further relaying the data to the
central data center for further processing on real time basis. Here, the cloud platform also
provides the capability to store up to PB of power usage data collected via smart meters on real
time basis.
 Figure 1: Smart Grid coupled with Cloud Computing

The various units supporting various phases are under the control of dedicated
control centers. These control centers have access and control across all the operations of the
SGNs. This implies that, the service providers would be able to control, monitor and administer
all the grid related operations ranging from generation to transmission to distribution on the click
of the button. On the other hand, the backend server for these control centers resides on the
cloud. Thus entire user related data and its analysis and processing would be supported by
various applications deployed on cloud infrastructure. Such computations involve extensive
processing power that require dedicated resources and would be done in a distributed manner to
fasten up all the computations. These applications revolve around various areas e.g. energy
management, dynamic demand response management, market management, outage management,
transmission management, distribution management, meter data management and so forth.
Figure 2 depicts the bunch of applications that would be deployed on cloud. Here, the cloud
platform would also be used to host customer centric applications related to billing, power usage
monitoring and suggestions, dynamic pricing, auto-alert systems (via email and message) etc.

Figure 2: - Various Applications Supported by Cloud in Smart Grid coupled with

Thus, cloud technology plays a central role in data storage, management and
processing. Moreover, cloud will act as a single platform to support all IT related operations
across the SGNs and fulfill user’s request via virtue of various applications. This architecture
would lead to faster, reliable and timely management of the grid assets and user data.

 Salient features of Smart Grid coupled with Cloud Technology

• Enable convenient means of generating, transmitting and distributing electricity.

• Also provide rooms for electric power storage on large scale.
• Provide the capability to integrate the generation of electricity from various renewable
and non-renewable energy resources in a distributed manner. They are equipped with the
power plants ranging from thermal to solar farms to wind farms.
• Smart grids have widened the scope of conventional grids with full automation and
optimization across all phases.
• It keeps the customer more informative (e.g., present energy usage, dynamic pricing,
total cost of usage etc.) via a two way communication process. They also support
automated metering facility with the help of smart meters.
• Provide end users with the timely and accurate information related to their energy
consumptions, billing and means to optimize and control their usage.
• NIST has led down seven different domains of smart grid: Transmission, Generation,
Distribution, Operations, Service Providers, Market and Customers.
• Emphasizes the support for integrating smart homes, smart appliances, plug-in electric
vehicles, HAN, BAN, NAN etc.
• All the operations across the Smart Grid are managed by the efficient control centers.
These centers provide the SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) facilities
that manage all the operations in an optimized manner, report issues/anomalies, reflect
the electricity usage status, present demand on the grid, manage blackouts etc.

3) CYBER SECURITY ISSUES:

Smart Grids have become a prime target against cyber-attacks and terrorism due to their
immense potential and wide range of service industries supported by them. This section
addresses some recent attacks against smart grids, security objectives and related security
issues/concerns. The sole intension of such attacks is to hamper the working of smart grids and
thus, disrupt the services offered by them. Such large scale interruption of electric supply can
cause huge financial losses and could bring nearly all industries to a standstill.
A. Recent Security Attacks
The research done by Parks Associate indicates that 6 of smart meters installed in US
have been compromised by the intruders. Potential breach of smart meter at one end exposes the
vulnerabilities of others as well and hence propagating the attack by itself. The Wall Street
Journal has also reported cyber-criminal attacks against the US smart grid by Russia, China and
other nations. One of the major attacks in this regard is that of Stuxnet Worm in 2010. It was
suspected to have been created by US and Iraqi Government and was launched against the
Iranian Power Plant.
B. Security Objectives
Smart Grids are critical networks that require security to be implemented to their core.
They are implemented and deployed to provide high availability to various industrial and
residential sectors. Keeping their importance into mind, NIST Smart Grid interoperability panel
has released the three security objectives for smart grid networks (SGN): Confidentiality,
Integrity and Availability as depicted in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Security Objectives for Smart Grids

a) Confidentiality: Data confidentiality implies to the fact that, data should always be protected
against any kind of unauthorized access. Data confidentiality can be enforced by various
cryptographic techniques. Violation of this security objective could lead to data leakage attacks
compromising the user’s privacy.
b) Integrity: Data being communicated between any two parties with the SGNs needs to be
guarded against both intentional and unintentional tampering and destruction of data. Loss of
data integrity could lead to havoc in the smart grid functioning and operations. For example, it
can induce incorrect electric usage records, issue unsafe SCADA operations, compromise the
user’s privacy and lead to blackout and brownout scenarios.
c) Availability: Availability implies constant up and running applications and accessible to the
legitimate users. In the context of smart grid operations, it refers to the availability to all the
related resources and information that are involved in timely and reliable generation,
transmission and distribution of electricity power. Even minor delays or unavailability of
services caused due to network overload, malware injection or vulnerabilities could lead to
billion dollar financial losses to the interdependent sectors on power.
C. Security Issues
Smart Grids are diverse networks that are connected via networks of computers to open networks
e.g. internet. Due to this, they are exposed to greater security risks and cyber-attacks. Attacks on
smart grid could range from data leakages to complete blackouts. The intruder/attacker might
control million of smart meters and shut them off simultaneously. These intruders could also
direct their attacks in order to increase or decrease the demand supply on the grid. These attacks
can lead to consequences that are unimaginable. Thus, it’s essential to take their security into
prime consideration.
Following Figure 4 depicts some of the security issues pertaining to this scope.

Figure 4: Various Security Threats

a) User Privacy Issues: Service and utility providers acquire user’s electric usage pattern
information via smart meters at regular intervals of time. This is done in order to provide
efficient energy consumption details to customers. This fine grained information is capable of
revealing many details about the customers, i.e., their sleeping habits, office hours, socialising
timings, trace their positions (via PHEV) etc. Many intruders and third party vendors might get
interested in this information in order to take their advantage. For example, vendors might view
this information as very strategic from the point of view to sell their appliances to the targeted
audience. On the other hand, intruders might find this information useful in order to launch more
severe attacks. This disclosure of information can be a result of eavesdropping and sniffing
attacks leading to customer’s privacy violations. This information might prove to be beneficial to
various intruders and third party vendors.
b) Physical Security Issues: Electric equipment’s incorporated in Smart Grid architecture like
smart metres are easily accessible by all. They provide an easy mechanism/way for the intruders
to get access to the grids data and operations directly or indirectly. Thus, ensuring their physical
security is of prime concern in order to ensure reliable operations across the grid. Utility
providers might tamper with these equipment’s in order to charge the customers more. On the
other hand, the customers might tweak with their functionality in order to depict less electric
usage than actual. The attackers can also reverse engineer these metres to find their potential
vulnerabilities or infect them with malwares. Thus, such attacks could lead to unimaginable
losses ranging from total blackout to huge electricity frauds. Therefore, these equipment’s should
be built in such a manner that, any tampering would render them useless to operate and function.
Data Transmission Issues: Distributed and wide area deployment of smart grids is supported by
various means of communication between the cloud infrastructure, control centres, customers’
premises and power generation and transmission unit. Due to this diversified means of
communication, the data may be compromised by the attackers by various means e.g. sniffing,
man-in-middle attack, spoofing, replay attacks etc. Such attacks lead to confidential and integrity
violation of users and industrial data. Thus, data should be protected while in transmission by
encrypting it using various algorithms e.g. AES, ECC etc.
a) Cloud Storage Related Issues: Indeed the coupling of the cloud computing technology is an
innovative concept with respect to smart grid with infinite benefits. But these benefits are
coupled with a number of security and privacy issues. A survey conducted by Fujitsu Research
Institute revealed that almost 80% of the customers using cloud services have high concerns
related to the security of their data and hosted applications. Cloud Security Alliances conducted
an extensive research survey in 2013 pertaining to the threats with respect to cloud security.
Their survey revealed these nine most notorious threats thwarting the cloud security: Data
Breaches, Data Loss, Account Hijacking, Insecure APIs, Denial of Service, Malicious Insiders
and Abuse of Cloud Services.
b) Auditing Issues: The coupling of IT and communication technology with the electric devices
have exposed the smart grid to greater risks and threats than ever before. Hence, in order to
safeguard their functionality and operations, effective auditing standards need to be enforced.
This means that irregularly scheduled auditing trails by specialized teams should be conducted to
audit the entire system. These trails will help enforce better security policies and compliances to
discover numerous gray areas e.g. improper logging, unpatched machines and servers, irregular
backup policy and much more. The true essence of this process will be realized if both the
service providers and utility providers agree to confirm their policies and operations with respect
to international auditing standards (e.g. WIB, ISA,IAASB etc ) at regular intervals.

c) Default/ Mis-Configuration Issues: As already mentioned earlier, smart grid is a complex

network of heterogeneous devices ranging from purely electric devices to purely networking
devices. Thus, management of such a diverse network is a huge task in itself. Therefore, it is
essential to ensure that these devices are not left with their default configurations or mis
configured , due to which they can easily fall as pray in the hands of the attackers. Once such a
device has been identified and compromised, it becomes relatively simple for the attackers to
propagate their attack vector to their devices as well. Hence, such loopholes can lead to
undesirable consequences leading to violation of data integrity, confidentiality and availability.
Therefore, it is very important for service providers to ensure that all these devices are properly
configured post making them operational.

d) Vulnerabilities: Vulnerabilities refer to flaws in the system, device or a piece of software,

which introduces serious risks to compromise it. They provide shelter to various kinds of attacks
by the intruders and hence can lead to serious consequences. In SGN, vulnerabilities can arise at
various levels, i.e., operating system level, software level or hardware level etc. These
vulnerabilities comprise of zero day attacks, buffer over flow attacks, data privacy attacks etc. In
order to get rid of these issues, entire network needs to be configured for rigorous vulnerabilities
assessments, time to time patch update processes and installation of updated antivirus, IPS and
IDS.

e) Availability Issues: The entire SGN operates on the underlying IP protocol and TCP/IP stack.
Hence, it becomes vulnerable to DDOS, DOS and other inherent vulnerabilities of TCP/IP stack
[2]. DOS (Denial of Service) and DDOS (Distributed DOS) attacks are basically attacks on the
availability of data, services, network or critical assets to the legitimate users. In case of Smart
Grid operations, such attacks may be targeted against the control centres, critical applications
deployed on cloud infrastructure etc. These attacks would hinder the timely response of the
related applications to the legitimate service providers, utility providers and the customers, thus
putting entire operations of smart grid to a stake. The impacted applications may either respond
with delay or may completely stop responding causing huge financial losses to the entire nation
[9, 10]. These malicious intents/attacks are formulated by consuming or overwhelming the
available resources or the related communication channel. For example, an adversary may bring
the entire performance of the control centre to knees by flooding its related communication
channel with huge traffic.
f) SCADA communication protocol issues: Modbus is a de-facto standard communication
protocol that is being used in SCADA systems. This communication protocol suffers from a
number of vulnerabilities and hence, is prone to several attacks. Some of the attacks in this
regard are: replay attack, message spoofing attacks, sniffing attacks, response delay attacks,
network scanning attacks etc [13].