Diverse Grouping-Based Aggregation Protocol With Error Detection for Smart Grid Communications

Abstract

Smart grid, as the next generation of power grid characterized by “two-way” communications, has been paid great attention to realizing green, reliable, and efficient electricity delivery for our future lives. In order to support the two-way communications in smart grid, a large number of smart meters (SMs) should be deployed to customers to report their near real-time data to control center for monitoring purpose. However, this kind of real-time report could disclose users’ privacy, bringing down the users’ willingness to participate in smart grid. In order to address the challenge, in this paper, by considering the lifetime of SMs as exponential distribution, we propose a diverse grouping-based aggregation protocol with error detection (DG-APED), which employs differential privacy technique into grouping-based private stream aggregation for secure smart grid communications. DG-APED can not only achieve privacy-preserving aggregation, but also perform error detection efficiently when some SMs are malfunctioning. Detailed security analysis shows that DG-APED can guarantee the security and privacy requirements of smart grid communications. In addition, extensive performance evaluation also verifies the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed DG-APED.