APED: An efficient aggregation protocol with error detection for smart grid communications

Smart grid, as the next generation of power grid characterized with “two-way” communications, has been paid great attention to realize 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 should be deployed at customers to report their near real-time data to control center for monitoring. 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, we propose an efficient aggregation protocol with error detection, named APED, for secure smart grid communications. The proposed APED protocol employs a pairwise private stream aggregation scheme to not only achieve privacy-preserving aggregation but also perform error detection when some smart meters are malfunctioning. Detailed security analysis has shown that the proposed APED protocol can guarantee the security and privacy of smart grid communications. In addition, performance evaluation demonstrates its efficiency in terms of computation and communication cost.