SMART-ER: Peer-based privacy for smart metering

Abstract

Smart metering is an essential part of the future smart grid but causes privacy issues by collecting sensitive data from households with a high temporal resolution. Peer-based privacy mechanisms can solve this problem through privacy-aware aggregation. The SMART algorithm, originally proposed for wireless sensor networks, is a lightweight approach to this problem. In this paper, we propose to adapt the ideas of SMART for privacy-aware smart metering. However, our simulation results show, that accuracy suffers in the presence of communication errors especially in large networks. Therefore, we designed SMART-ER, an improved version of SMART. It utilizes dependency tracking and grouping to provide exact and robust smart metering even in the presence of communication errors. We show, that SMART-ER provides significantly more accurate results in typical churn scenarios.