Smart Meter Privacy with Renewable Energy and an Energy Storage Device

Giulio Giaconi; Deniz Gunduz; H. Vincent Poor

doi:10.1109/TIFS.2017.2744601

Smart Meter Privacy with Renewable Energy and an Energy Storage Device

Giulio Giaconi, Deniz Gunduz, H. Vincent Poor

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

69 Scopus citations

Abstract

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 energy requested from the grid, which the SM reads and reports to the UP. The impact of the knowledge of the amount of energy generated by the RES at the UP is also considered. The minimum information leakage rate is characterized as a computable information theoretic single-letter expression in the two extreme cases, that is, when the battery capacity is infinite or zero. Numerical results are presented for the finite battery capacity case to illustrate the potential privacy gains from the existence of an RB. It is shown that, while the information leakage rate decreases with increasing availability of an RES, larger storage capacity is needed to fully exploit the available energy to improve the privacy.

Original language	English (US)
Article number	8016368
Pages (from-to)	129-142
Number of pages	14
Journal	IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Volume	13
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2017.2744601
State	Published - Jan 2018

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
Computer Networks and Communications

Keywords

Energy storage
Information theory
Load management
Mutual information
Privacy
Renewable energy sources
Smart grids
Smart meter

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10.1109/TIFS.2017.2744601

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title = "Smart Meter Privacy with Renewable Energy and an Energy Storage Device",

abstract = "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 energy requested from the grid, which the SM reads and reports to the UP. The impact of the knowledge of the amount of energy generated by the RES at the UP is also considered. The minimum information leakage rate is characterized as a computable information theoretic single-letter expression in the two extreme cases, that is, when the battery capacity is infinite or zero. Numerical results are presented for the finite battery capacity case to illustrate the potential privacy gains from the existence of an RB. It is shown that, while the information leakage rate decreases with increasing availability of an RES, larger storage capacity is needed to fully exploit the available energy to improve the privacy.",

keywords = "Energy storage, Information theory, Load management, Mutual information, Privacy, Renewable energy sources, Smart grids, Smart meter",

author = "Giulio Giaconi and Deniz Gunduz and Poor, {H. Vincent}",

note = "Funding Information: Manuscript received March 28, 2017; revised July 19, 2017; accepted August 13, 2017. Date of publication August 24, 2017; date of current version November 20, 2017. The work of G. Giaconi was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the U.K. under Grant 1507704. This work was supported in part by the EPSRC through the project COPES under Grant 173605884, in part by the European Research Council under Starting Grant BEACON (agreement 677854), and in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grant CMMI-1435778, Grant ECCS-1549881, and Grant ECCS-1647198. This paper was presented in part at the IEEE International Conference on Communications, London, U.K., 2015 [1]. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Dr. Sheng Zhong. (Corresponding author: Giulio Giaconi.) G. Giaconi and D. G{\"u}nd{\"u}z are with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, U.K. (e-mail: g.giaconi@imperial.ac.uk; d.gunduz@imperial.ac.uk). Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2017 IEEE.",

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AU - Giaconi, Giulio

AU - Gunduz, Deniz

AU - Poor, H. Vincent

N1 - Funding Information: Manuscript received March 28, 2017; revised July 19, 2017; accepted August 13, 2017. Date of publication August 24, 2017; date of current version November 20, 2017. The work of G. Giaconi was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the U.K. under Grant 1507704. This work was supported in part by the EPSRC through the project COPES under Grant 173605884, in part by the European Research Council under Starting Grant BEACON (agreement 677854), and in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grant CMMI-1435778, Grant ECCS-1549881, and Grant ECCS-1647198. This paper was presented in part at the IEEE International Conference on Communications, London, U.K., 2015 [1]. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Dr. Sheng Zhong. (Corresponding author: Giulio Giaconi.) G. Giaconi and D. Gündüz are with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, U.K. (e-mail: g.giaconi@imperial.ac.uk; d.gunduz@imperial.ac.uk). Publisher Copyright: © 2017 IEEE.

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KW - Load management

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KW - Privacy

KW - Renewable energy sources

KW - Smart grids

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Smart Meter Privacy with Renewable Energy and an Energy Storage Device

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All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

Keywords

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