Progressive Average-Based Smart Meter Privacy Enhancement Using Rechargeable Batteries

Usage of smart meters (SMs) have significantly increased in the recent days due to the advantages they offer. However, it is possible for an adversary to extract private information about a consumer by observing the SM readings. Therefore, it is important to protect the privacy of consumers using SMs. Among the SM privacy protection mechanisms, rechargeable battery (RB)-based mechanisms are preferred as they do not alter SM readings. The existing mechanisms cannot protect the privacy when the consumer energy usage is either low or high for a longer period. Furthermore, these mechanisms do not perform well in online scenario where the energy management unit (EMU) only knows the current and past consumer energy demands. To solve this problem, in this article, we proposed a novel online privacy protection mechanism to protect the privacy of SMs using a progressive average-based algorithm (PABA). The proposed PABA uses two uniquely designed algorithms to ensure protection of privacy and energy cost reduction during peak and off-peak periods. Moreover, an adaptive output smoothing technique is used to further enhance the privacy. Compared with the privacy protection mechanisms designed for tackling SM privacy, the proposed mechanism achieves higher amount of privacy while reducing the energy cost. The validity of the proposed privacy enhancement mechanism is demonstrated by simulation results.