Department of Electrical Engineering, New Mexico Tech, Socorro, NM 87801, USA.
Department of Computer Science, Montana Technological University, Butte, MT 59701, USA.
Sensors (Basel). 2023 Jan 21;23(3):1245. doi: 10.3390/s23031245.
Smart appliances' run schedule and electric vehicles charging can be managed over a smart grid enabled home area network (HAN) to reduce electricity demand at critical times and add more plug-in electric vehicles to the grid, which eventually lower customers' energy bills and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Short range radio-based wireless communication technologies commonly adopted in a HAN are vulnerable to cyber attacks due to their wide interception range. In this work, a low-cost solution is proposed for securing the low-volume data exchange of sensitive tasks (e.g., key management and mutual authentication). Our approach utilizes the emerging concept of retro-reflector based visible light communication (Retro-VLC), where smart appliances, IoT sensors and other electric devices perform the sensitive data exchange with the HAN gateway via the secure Retro-VLC channel. To conduct the feasibility study, a multi-pixel Retro-VLC link is prototyped to enable quadrature amplitude modulation. The bit error rate of Retro-VLC is studied analytically, numerically and experimentally. A heterogeneous Retro-VLC + WLAN connection is implemented by socket programming. In addition, the working range, sniffing range, and key exchange latency are measured. The results validate the applicability of the Retro-VLC based solution.
智能家电的运行时间表和电动汽车的充电可以通过智能电网支持的家庭局域网 (HAN) 进行管理，以减少关键时期的电力需求，并增加更多的插电式电动汽车到电网，从而最终降低客户的电费和减少温室气体排放。由于 HAN 中采用的基于短距离无线电的无线通信技术具有广泛的拦截范围，因此它们容易受到网络攻击。在这项工作中，提出了一种低成本的解决方案，用于保护敏感任务（例如，密钥管理和相互认证）的低容量数据交换。我们的方法利用新兴的基于反向反射器的可见光通信 (Retro-VLC) 概念，智能家电、物联网传感器和其他电气设备通过安全的 Retro-VLC 通道与 HAN 网关进行敏感数据交换。为了进行可行性研究，我们原型化了一个多像素 Retro-VLC 链路以实现正交幅度调制。对 Retro-VLC 的误码率进行了分析、数值和实验研究。通过套接字编程实现了异构 Retro-VLC+WLAN 连接。此外，还测量了工作范围、嗅探范围和密钥交换延迟。结果验证了基于 Retro-VLC 的解决方案的适用性。
