Efficient Privacy-preserving Charging Coordination with Linkability-resistance in the Smart Grid

Abstract

A charging coordination is crucial for a successful integration of the Energy Storage Units (ESU) into the future smart grid. ESU need to send requests with battery state-of-charge (SoC) and time-to-complete-charging (TCC) to the charging controller (CC) to prepare charging schedules. However, sending these requests may reveal private information such as their locations, if they return their homes and if they are travelling. We show by simulations that the CC is able to link ESUs’ requests as their TCC/SOC are linkable. This paper proposes efficient privacy-aware charging coordination scheme with linkability-resistance. ESU use unlinkable and anonymous tokens to authenticate their charging requests. To avoid linkability, our scheme let an ESU to divide its charging request into multiple requests with different TCC/SOC with a truncated normal distribution. Our scheme also devises charging schedules at the CC that aims to maximize energy delivered to ESU before expiry of charging requests while observing charging maximum capacity. Our simulations/analysis illustrate that our scheme can preserves ESU privacy.