Diverse Grouping-Based Aggregation Protocol With Error Detection for Smart Grid Communications

Smart grid, as the next generation of power grid characterized by “two-way” communications, has been paid great attention to realizing 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 (SMs) should be deployed to customers to report their near real-time data to control center for monitoring purpose. 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, by considering the lifetime of SMs as exponential distribution, we propose a diverse grouping-based aggregation protocol with error detection (DG-APED), which employs differential privacy technique into grouping-based private stream aggregation for secure smart grid communications. DG-APED can not only achieve privacy-preserving aggregation, but also perform error detection efficiently when some SMs are malfunctioning. Detailed security analysis shows that DG-APED can guarantee the security and privacy requirements of smart grid communications. In addition, extensive performance evaluation also verifies the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed DG-APED.