No abstract

With the increase in use of information technology in advanced demand side management and given the growth in power consumption in the computation and communications sectors, a new class of cyber-intrusion plans is emerging that aims to alter the load through the Internet and by means of automatic and distributed software intruding agents. These attacks work by compromising direct load control command signals, demand side management price signals, or cloud computation load distribution algorithms to affect the load at the most crucial locations in the grid in order to cause circuite overflow or other malfunctions and damage the power system equipments. To gain insights into these less-examined yet important intrusion strategies, in this paper, we identify a variety of practical loads that can be volnurable to Internet-based load altering attacks. In addition, we overview a collection of defence mechanisms that can help in blocking these attacks or minimizing the damage caused by them. Our simulation results based on the standard setting in the IEEE 24bus Reliability Test System show that our proposed cost-efficent load protection strategy can significantly reduce the cost of load protection while it guarantees that no Internet-based load altering attack may overload the power distribution system.

Wireless links are often unreliable and prone to transmission error due to varying channel conditions. These can degrade the performance in wireless networks, particularly for applications with tight quality-of-service requirements. A common remedy is to use channel coding where the transmitter node adds redundant bits to the transmitted packets in order to reduce the error probability at the receiver. However, this perlink solution can compromise the effective link data rate, leading to undesired end-to-end performance. In this paper, we show that this latter shortcoming can be mitigated if the end-to-end transmission rates and channel code rates are selected properly over multiple routing paths. We formulate the joint channel coding and end-to-end data rate allocation problem in multipath wireless networks as a network throughput maximization problem, which is non-convex. We tackle the non-convexity by using function approximation and iterative techniques from signomial programming. Simulation results confirm that by using channel coding jointly with multi-path routing, the end-to-end network performance can be improved significantly.