Providing Anonymous Communication, Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation and Dynamic Billing System in Smart Grid Using Permissioned Blockchain

Abstract

This paper proposes an efficient data aggregation and dynamic billing system that it uses anonymous communication for exchanging information between smart meters and CC. Moreover, the given scheme consists of a permissioned blockchain. This blockchain contains the ledger that keeps users’ anonymized identities and electricity consumption for predefined time ranges. Using consumption data of users, a billing mechanism can bill the users accordingly. In the construction, since all the parties in the system have the ledger, every party has the aggregated usage of the electricity without using very heavy cryptographic operations such as homomorphic encryption, bilinear pairing, etc. Using the ledger in our model, the aggregation of the users’ electricity consumption can be computed by anyone in the system. Moreover, users can verify their bills and check any data using a signature scheme. This results in that the integrity of all data is going to be preserved. The proposed approach mainly uses hash functions to provide the same functionality (aggregation of the users’ data consumption, data integrity check, and dynamic pricing and billing) with preserving data privacy of the users.