Standardization and Security for Smart Grid Communications Based on Cognitive Radio Technologies—A Comprehensive Survey

Today’s electric power grids have been ageing and are ill-suited to meet fast-growing demands for electricity energy generation, delivery, and supply. Global climate change and greenhouse gas emissions on the Earth caused by power industries put a high pressure on the existing power grids. Consequently, smart grid (SG) has emerged to address these challenges. The SG can achieve improved load balancing through accessing instantaneous electricity demand information via two-way communication and power flows, which help power plants match their output to the demand precisely. To this end, SG works based on the exchanges of a large amount of information generated from metering, sensing, and monitoring. Hence, the choice of communication infrastructure for SG is critical to provide secure, reliable, and efficient data delivery between various SG components. Cognitive radio (CR) network has been recognized as a promising technology to address communication requirements, standardization, and security problems of SG. Moreover, possible solutions in CR-based SG communications are also identified. In particular, we identify the major challenges of communication architecture, standardization, and security issues to implement CR-based SG communications. The aim of this paper is to offer a comprehensive review on the state-of-the-art researches on CR-based SG communications, to highlight what have been investigated and what still remain to be addressed, particularly, in standardization and security aspects.