Blockchain based Distributed Consensus for Byzantine Fault Tolerance in PMU Network

Smart grids are in their developing stages, but they are going to impact the world soon. The more they influence us, the more they have a threat of being misused. Industrial Internet of Things(IIoT) is being extensively used in various smart grid based applications. IIoT has been an area for cyber-attacks to drastically affect various industries and businesses. Existing technologies are just not enough to deal with cyber-physical systems. Blockchain can help in creating more efficient, secure and reliable IIoT systems. Such systems, which involve rapid, distributed and complex energy transactions and data exchanges often face integrity and trust related issues. Blockchain can provide a solution to such problems. Third-party interactions have been removed using blockchain based smart contracts, thereby facilitating the adoption of decentralization and establishing a global truth across all the nodes in the network. Efficiency can further be increased by logging only the most important events like faults in the system or injection of malicious data. This paper proposes an innovative collective decision algorithm using blockchain to build a resilient network of Phasor Measurement Units(PMUs) for Wide Area Measurement System(WAMS). The algorithm not only identifies "malicious" nodes in the system but also takes the correct decision, even in their presence, to perform further action. The proposed solution is validated on a hardware-in-loop platform with the hardware PMUs connected on an IEEE 9 bus system.