A battery charging policy that provides privacy guarantees for smart meter systems with finite capacity battery is proposed. For this policy an upper bound on the information leakage rate is provided. The upper bound applies for general random processes modelling the energy consumption of the user. It is shown that the average energy consumption of the user determines the information leakage rate to the utility provider. The upper bound is shown to be tight by deriving the probability law of a random process achieving the bound.
Smart meters enable improvements in electricity distribution system efficiency at some cost in customer privacy. Users with home batteries can mitigate this privacy loss by applying charging policies that mask their underlying energy use. A battery charging policy is proposed and shown to provide universal privacy guarantees subject to a constraint on energy cost. The guarantee bounds our strategy's maximal information leakage from the user to the utility provider under general stochastic models of user energy consumption. The policy construction adapts coding strategies for non-probabilistic …
Smart meters are key elements for the operation of smart grids. By providing near realtime information on the energy consumption of individual users, smart meters increase the efficiency in generation, distribution and storage of energy in a smart grid. The ability of the utility provider to track users energy consumption inevitably leads to important threats to privacy. In this paper, privacy in a smart metering system is studied from an information theoretic perspective in the presence of energy harvesting and storage units. It is shown that energy harvesting provides increased privacy by di…
End-user privacy in smart meter measurements is a well-known challenge in the smart grid. The solutions offered thus far have been tied to specific technologies such as batteries or assumptions on data usage. Existing solutions have also not quantified the loss of benefit (utility) that results from any such privacy-preserving approach. Using tools from information theory, a new framework is presented that abstracts both the privacy and the utility requirements of smart meter data. This leads to a novel privacy-utility tradeoff problem with minimal assumptions that is tractable. Specifically f…
The introduction of smart electricity meters with cellular radio interface puts an additional load on the wireless cellular networks. Currently, these meters are designed for low duty cycle billing and occasional system check, which generates a low-rate sporadic traffic. As the number of distributed energy resources increases, the household power will become more variable and thus unpredictable from the viewpoint of the Distribution System Operator (DSO). It is therefore expected, in the near future, to have an increased number of Wide Area Measurement System (WAMS) devices with Phasor Measure…
We address the smart meter (SM) privacy problem by considering the availability of a renewable energy source (RES) and a battery which can be exploited by a consumer to partially hide the consumption pattern from the utility provider (UP). Privacy is measured by the mutual information rate between the consumer's energy consumption and the renewable energy generation process, and the energy received from the grid, where the latter is known by the UP through the SM readings, and the former two are to be kept private. By expressing the information leakage as an additive quantity, we cast the prob…
Trade-offs between privacy and cost are studied for a smart grid consumer, whose electricity consumption is monitored in almost real time by the utility provider (UP) through smart meter (SM) readings. It is assumed that an electrical battery is available to the consumer, which can be utilized both to achieve privacy and to reduce the energy cost by demand shaping. Privacy is measured via the mean squared distance between the SM readings and a target load profile, while time-of-use (ToU) pricing is considered to compute the cost incurred. The consumer can also sell electricity back to the UP t…
This letter presents an experimental study and a novel modelling approach of the wireless channel of smart utility meters placed in basements or sculleries. The experimental data consist of signal strength measurements of consumption report packets. Since such packets are only registered if they can be decoded by the receiver, the part of the signal strength distribution that falls below the receiver sensitivity threshold is not observable. We combine a Rician fading model with a bias function that captures the cut-off in the observed signal strength measurements. Two sets of experimental data…
Smart grids (SGs) promise to deliver dramatic improvements compared to traditional power grids thanks primarily to the large amount of data being exchanged and processed within the grid, which enables the grid to be monitored more accurately and at a much faster pace. The smart meter (SM) is one of the key devices that enable the SG concept by monitoring a household's electricity consumption and reporting it to the utility provider (UP), i.e., the entity that sells energy to customers, or to the distribution system operator (DSO), i.e., the entity that operates and manages the grid, with high …
We study the privacy-cost trade-off in a smart meter (SM) system with a renewable energy source (RES) and a finite-capacity rechargeable battery (RB). Privacy is measured by the mutual information rate between the energy demand and the energy received from the grid, where the latter also determines the cost, and hence, reported by the SM to the utility provider (UP). We consider a renewable energy generation process that fully charges the RB at random time instants, and its realization is assumed to be known also by the UP. We reformulate the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP), and sol…
In this paper we introduce a lowest density MDS array code which is applied to a Smart Meter network to introduce reliability. By treating the network as distributed storage with multiple sources, information can be exchanged between the nodes in the network allowing each node to store parity symbols relating to data from other nodes. A lowest density MDS array code is then applied to make the network robust against outages, ensuring low overhead and data transfers. We show the minimum amount of overhead required to be able to recover from r node erasures in an n node network and explicitly de…
Smart Grids measure energy usage in real-time and tailor supply and delivery accordingly, in order to improve power transmission and distribution. For the grids to operate effectively, it is critical to collect readings from massively-installed smart meters to control centers in an efficient and secure manner. In this paper, we propose a secure compressed reading scheme to address this critical issue. We observe that our collected real-world meter data express strong temporal correlations, indicating they are sparse in certain domains. We adopt Compressed Sensing technique to exploit this spar…
A smart meter (SM) periodically measures end-user electricity consumption and reports it to a utility provider (UP). Despite the advantages of SMs, their use leads to serious concerns about consumer privacy. In this paper, SM privacy is studied by considering the presence of an energy harvesting device (EHD) as a means of masking the user's input load. The user can satisfy part or all of his/her energy needs from the EHD, and hence, less information can be leaked to the UP via the SM. The EHD is typically equipped with a rechargeable energy storage device, i.e., a battery, whose instantaneous …
Smart-metering systems report electricity usage of a user to the utility provider on almost real-time basis. This could leak private information about the user to the utility provider. In this work we investigate the use of a rechargeable battery in order to provide privacy to the user. We assume that the user load sequence is a first-order Markov process, the battery satisfies ideal charge conservation, and that privacy is measured using normalized mutual information (leakage rate) between the user load and the battery output. We consider battery charging policies in this setup that satisfy t…
This paper analyzes a scenario where the distribution system operator needs to estimate whether the average power demand in a given period is above a predetermined threshold using an 1-bit memoryless scheme. Specifically, individual smart-meters periodically monitor the average power demand of their respective households to inform the system operator if it is above a predetermined level using only a 1-bit signal. The communication link between the meters and the operator occurs in two hops and is modeled as binary symmetric channels. The first hop connects individual smart meters to their corr…
A smart meter (SM) measures a consumer's electricity consumption and reports it automatically to a utility provider (UP) in almost real time. Despite many advantages of SMs, their use also leads to serious concerns about consumer privacy. In this paper, SM privacy is studied by considering the presence of a renewable energy source (RES) and a rechargeable battery (RB), which can be used to partially hide the consumer's energy consumption behavior. Privacy is measured by the information leakage rate, which denotes the average mutual information between the user's real energy consumption and the…
The next-generation energy network, the so-called smart grid (SG), promises a tremendous increase in efficiency, safety and flexibility of managing the electricity grid as compared to the legacy energy network. This is needed today more than ever, as the global energy consumption is growing at an unprecedented rate, and renewable energy sources have to be seamlessly integrated into the grid to assure a sustainable human development. Smart meters (SMs) are among the crucial enablers of the SG concept; they supply accurate high-frequency information about users' household energy consumption to a…
Smart meters (SMs) measure and report users' energy consumption to the utility provider (UP) in almost real-time, providing a much more detailed depiction of the consumer's energy consumption compared to their analog counterparts. This increased rate of information flow to the UP, together with its many potential benefits, raise important concerns regarding user privacy. This work investigates, from an information theoretic perspective, the privacy that can be achieved in a multi-user SM system in the presence of an alternative energy source (AES). To measure privacy, we use the mutual informa…
McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；CentraleSupélec（中央理工-高等电力学院）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université Paris Sud（巴黎第十一大学）；Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (Mila)（蒙特利尔学习算法研究所）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）
Smart Meters (SMs) are able to share the power consumption of users with utility providers almost in real-time. These fine-grained signals carry sensitive information about users, which has raised serious concerns from the privacy viewpoint. In this paper, we focus on real-time privacy threats, i.e., potential attackers that try to infer sensitive information from SMs data in an online fashion. We adopt an information-theoretic privacy measure and show that it effectively limits the performance of any attacker. Then, we propose a general formulation to design a privatization mechanism that can…
