Fuzzy-based trusted routing to mitigate packet dropping attack between data aggregation points in smart grid communication network

Providing adequate security measure during data transmission is one of the essential requirements of smart grid communication network (SGCN). In this paper, a novel trust management model is proposed to alleviate packet dropping attack between data aggregation points of SGCN. The concept of probability theory is used to calculate trust of every node in the network before transmitting the packet. Trust evaluation is conducted in four stages viz., Direct, Indirect, Integrated and Overall trust and in each stage, suitable equations are suggested to measure the trust of each node. A novel technique based on fuzzy set theory is used to route the packet through the trusted channel. Hop count, reliability and capacity of the link are the parameters considered for constructing if-then rules and membership function. A qualitative reasoning is performed using inference mechanism and a defuzzication strategy is applied on the calculated trust value to make decision. Simulations are carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach by varying the trust threshold and malicious nodes. From the experiments, it is observed that for all the metrics, the proposed trusted routing using fuzzy theory helps to improve the network performance with much reliable communication and reduced packet loss.