An Approach to Secure Mobile Agents in Automatic Meter Reading

Mobile agent is a suitable paradigm to collect information from multiple sites in a distributed environment. As compare to other technologies, mobile agents can be used beneficially for Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) and to measure power quality information at each energy meter.. The energy meter contains embedded system, so the choice of agent platform for such an application is very important. This article investigates different methods cited in literature that used mobile agent paradigm for AMR process. It proposes a method that reduces the total security computation cost which is incurred in AMR process. In this method, energy meters are organized in the form of a group based upon the geographical location. In one location energy meters perform their jobs under a security manager. The concept of local mobile agent is proposed to avoid the visit of external mobile agent to energy meters directly. Local mobile agent carries the acceptable queries from security manager and visits energy meters. Mathematical modeling is used to represent the security computation cost incurred by each method cited in literature and compared it with the propose method. It is concluded that the proposed mechanism reduces the security computation cost considerably, compared to other methods.