# Secure and Time-Aware Communication of Wireless Sensors Monitoring Overhead Transmission Lines
## 6 Conclusions  
Wireless sensors, intelligent substations and communication devices provide real-time information on system health so that smart grid operators can pro-actively prevent many issues. Using real-time information from wireless sensors and automated controls to detect and respond to system problems, a smart grid can automatically avoid or mitigate power outages, power quality problems, and service disruptions. However, all of the existing communication links in a smart grid environment introduce vulnerabilities, especially if they can be accessed over by a wireless medium. Thus, serious security analysis is needed to ensure that implemented solutions are truly adequate. In this paper, we proposed a reconfigurable network model and examined it in terms of security and time delays. Our objective was to minimize the time delays, depending on the number of sinks, clusters and confidentiality of the transmission. We did, however, take into account neither energy constraints, nor cost of deployment. Prior to simulations, we presented the general formulation of network architectures, scenarios and time delay problem. First, we analyzed the linear network model and came to conclusion that it suffers from the time delay issue and imbalance of workload. Nevertheless, we proved that its performance can be improved by careful choice of the position of direct wireless links. Later, after we investigated the first model, we utilized an optimization approach in order to minimize the maximum time delay. By examining different scenarios, we confirmed that the improvement made by the proposed solution is significant: Minimizing time delays, we managed to decrease the cost of network deployment ensuring secure communication at the same time.  
The approach proposed in this paper defines an efficient, low cost, and easily configurable network model. It is generic and encompasses a variety in several factors. Its flexibility and the ease of reconfigurability lets us examine miscellaneous network configurations and decide which of them will satisfy our needs best. We believe that the result of this paper can provide invaluable guidances for smart grid developers, and help them design future smart grid to be well balanced in terms of performance, cost and time delays.  
**Author Contributions:** This work was realized with the collaboration of all authors. [PERSON] and [PERSON] contributed to the idea of this work. [PERSON] created the model, prepared simulations, analysed the data and wrote the biggest part of the article. [PERSON] and [PERSON] helped with the editing of the writing. [PERSON] contributes with the related work part, which refers to the transmission lines. [PERSON] organized the work, provided the funding, defined and supervised the research and was involved in structuring the paper. All the authors contributed to the production of the paper, the discussion of the results and the reviewing process of the intellectual content of the article and finally approved the manuscript.  
**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.