Securing Smart Grid Enabled Home Area Networks with Retro-Reflective Visible Light Communication

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.