On the efficiency and privacy of smart grids neighborhood area networks

A key task of smart meters is to securely report the power consumption of households and provide dynamic pricing to consumers. While transmission to all meters can be performed via a simple broadcast, several challenges are faced during the reporting process. Firstly, the communication network should be able to handle the large amount of load reports, and secondly, the privacy of the load report should be ensured. In this paper, we propose a novel compressive sensing based network design that 1) reduces the communication network transmission overhead, and 2) ensures the privacy of the load reports. Based on recent findings from [1] and [2], numerical results show that the proposed design significantly reduces the network transmission overhead and utilizes the fading channel to encrypt the load reports, thus making it almost impossible for an eavesdropper to decipher the load reports. © 2013 IEEE.