Smart-frame: A flexible, scalable, and secure information management framework for smart grids

Smart grid is a technological innovation that improves efficiency, reliability, economics, and sustainability of electricity services. It plays a very important role in modern energy infrastructure. The main challenges of smart grids, however, are how to manage different types of front-end intelligent devices such as power assets and smart meters efficiently; and how to process a huge amount of data received from these devices. Cloud computing is a good candidate to address these challenges since it has several good properties such as energy saving, cost saving, agility, scalability, and flexibility. In this paper, we introduce a design of a cloud computing based framework for information management in smart grids. Additionally, to address security issues of the smart grids, we present a security solution for our framework using hierarchical identity-based cryptography.