Theoretical Modelling of Smart Meter Privacy Protection with Multi-meter Energy Routing

Potential of intrusion during smart meter data collection is an important problem for household privacy in next-generation smart homes. There are various privacy protection methods such as hiding the real usage with renewable batteries (RBs) and encrypted communication. There are privacy threats due to the detection of the energy transfer through RBs while encryption-based methods result in high computational complexity. In this study, a novel privacy improvement mechanism is proposed based on the routing of energy through multiple smart meters among multiple houses in a neighborhood. The optimization of privacy based on uniform randomization is theoretically modeled and some heuristic solutions are presented. In this method, energy transfer is randomly distributed among multiple smart meters, real usage of a house is buffered with the RB and smart meter indices are randomly selected. In numerical simulations, privacy improvement is shown by utilizing the random selection of smart meter indices for randomizing the energy routing and the buffers of RBs. Furthermore, energy privacy (EP) metric validating the simulation results is defined. Energy routing with multiple smart meters provides a practical and low complexity privacy protection mechanism for next-generation smart grid architectures.