Abstract:
The future Smart Grid will enable homes to have
energy storage units that can store the excess power generated
from renewable energy sources and sell it to the grid during the
peak hours. Realization of this process, however, requires the
utility company to be able to communicate with the storage units
whenever needed. Nonetheless, the security and the privacy of this
communication is essential to not only ensure a fair energy selling
market but also eliminate any privacy concerns of the users
due to potential exposure of their energy levels. In this paper,
we propose a secure and privacy-preserving power injection
querying scheme by exploiting the already available Advanced
Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and Long-Term Evolution (LTE)
cellular networks. The idea is based on collecting power injection
bids from storage units and sending their aggregated value to the
utility rather than the individual bids in order to preserve user
privacy. We also develop a bilinear pairing based technique to
enable the utility company to ensure the integrity and authenticity
of the aggregated bid without accessing the individual bids. In this
way, no party will have access to the storage units’ individual bids
and use them to achieve unfair financial gains. We implemented
the proposed scheme in an integrated AMI/LTE network using
the ns-3 network simulator. Our evaluations have demonstrated
that the proposed scheme is secure and can protect user privacy
with acceptable communication and computation overhead.
