Implementation of electrical demand response (DR) in home
devices requires a robust and secure communication channel with which to
deliver pricing and event messages. The RBDS network has been
identified as a good candidate to deliver messages to DR enabled
devices. Through simulations, we show that RBDS can be
employed to effectively deliver DR messages. Effective targeting of
devices is non-trivial in a broadcast network like RBDS. We propose an
addressing scheme to efficiently group devices
logically, by location, and individually over RBDS with minimal overhead. We
also address the security concerns for DR messages delivered over RBDS by
investigating three strong authentication protocols. Simulations show that
devices up to 120km can receive authenticated messages with high probability
but beyond that, messages experience losses due to larger messages introduced
by signatures. ECDSA provides the strongest security but is more
computationally expensive than BiBa and HORSE.