LPPDA: A Light-Weight Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation Protocol for Smart Grids

Smart meters are continuously being deployed in several countries as a step in the direction of modernizing the power grid. Smart meters allow for automatic electricity consumption reporting to energy providers to facilitate billing and demand-based power generation. However, research has shown that such high resolution reporting to suppliers can potentially be used to invade consumers’ privacy; by identifying and predicting their behavior based on their consumption readings. This work presents a new protocol to preserve users’ privacy while maintaining the benefits of smart grids. The proposed method utilizes different techniques like randomization, masking, and differential privacy to build the scheme. The proposed method is shown to be more efficient compared to previous work in terms of performance and communication overhead. The implementation, simulation, and analysis are performed on datasets of real smart meters readings of households and electric vehicle chargers.