AMIsim: Application-layer Advanced Metering Infrastructure Simulation Framework for Secure Communication Protocol Performance Evaluation

The Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is a major component of the Smart Grid. Researchers have been working to protect its communication by designing pro-tocols that offer security and privacy in various ways to different extents. Simulation testing is a crucial part of any communication protocol development. Current sim-ulation frameworks for power Grid experiments primar-ily focus on simulating the electrical components and power flow in the Grid. In this paper, we introduce a uniform AMI simulation (AMIsim) framework for eval-uating secure and privacy-preserving AMI protocols. AMIsim allows researchers to conduct a performance assessment of their application-layer security protocols that are used for aggregation, privacy-preservation, and confidentiality/integrity protection of smart meter ener-gy data. We report on the empirical results of conducting experiments in AMIsim with an existing AMI secure and privacy-preserving protocol.