Smart Grid Networks enabled Electricity-Theft Detection and Fault Tolerance

Abstract

The Chadian electricity company (SNE) wants to deploy a good and a robust infrastructure in order to satisfy the increased demand needs, to have an effective management of the electricity grid and to detect the electricity theft. In fact, Fraudulent electricity consumption has many dangerous effects such as decreasing the supply quality, increasing generation load, affecting the overall economy, etc… The adaptation of smart grid and the use of the internet of things can significantly reduce this loss by analyzing the electricity consumption patterns of customers and identifying illegal consumers based on irregularities in consumption. In this paper, we present a sensor deployment infrastructure in N'Djamena city based on a self-stabilizing hierarchical algorithm. Then, we study the fault tolerance of the proposed algorithm and finally we detail the electricity theft detection approach. The objective of the SNE is not to completely replace the traditional electricity grid in one step, but to gradually evolve it into a smart grid by incorporating smart meters and sensors, taking into account the architectural aspects of the network and communication. The proposed method can effectively identify fraudulent users of the system. Extensive simulations using the OMNeT++ simulator reveal that the algorithm is convergent regardless of the parameter choice of the function choose.