Trade-off between Service Granularity and User Privacy in Smart Meter Operation

The term "smart grid" refers to the next generation power supply system. A smart meter, an essential component of the grid system, is installed at each housing unit and acts as an agent for the unit. While the smart meter is a key enabler of great opportunities and conveniences in smart grid, it is susceptible to various cyber-security attacks, especially privacy invasion from electricity providers. Trusted third party (TTP) and homomorphic encryption are two favorite tools to deal with this issue in the literature. Unfortunately, the use of TTP does not completely eliminate the privacy risk. On the other hand, the use of homomorphic encryption makes it harder for the providers to support various services whose demand can be highly diversified. In this paper, we introduce a drastically new approach to deal with the consumer privacy issue in smart grid. Our key idea is let each consumer to determine the frequency of the measurement report. In this way, each consumer can responsibly make a trade-off between the level of privacy preservation with the quality of the services it will receive.