Privacy-Preserving Power Injection Over a Hybrid AMI/LTE Smart Grid Network

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.