Privacy-Friendly Planning of Energy Distribution in Smart Grids

Abstract

The smart-grid is gaining increasing attention nowadays, owing to its premise to offer increased reliability, performance, and a balanced utilization of energy. However, the current design of smart-grids raises serious concerns with respect to the privacy and anonymity of users. Thus far, the literature has solely focused on the problem of privately aggregating energy reports and has not addressed the privacy threats that can occur through other intelligent operations which take place in the smart grid, such as planning the energy distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel solution that enables the planning of energy distribution in the grid without leaking any information about the energy requests of individual smart meters. We also implement a prototype based on our proposal and we evaluate its performance in realistic deployment settings.