GUARDIAN: Blockchain-Based Secure Demand Response Management in Smart Grid System

Smart grid (SG) is an emerging technology which provides many services to the end users and utilities, such as load management, frequency regulation, and grid stability. Although many solutions exist to provide these services in a secure manner, but these solutions are not adequate keeping in view of the heavy cryptographic primitives execution on these devices. Hence, in this article, GUARDIAN, a blockchain-based secure demand response management scheme is presented so as to take energy trading decisions securely for managing the overall load of residential, commercial, and industrial sectors. In GUARDIAN, the miner nodes, which are block verifiers, are selected using their power consumption and processing power. These nodes are responsible for authenticating the energy transactions in SG. The energy transaction is initialized by an end user which creates the block of transaction to trade the energy. The miner nodes then validate these blocks and adds these in the blockchain. The successful energy trade occurs only for the blocks which are in the blockchain. The proposed scheme is lightweight in terms of communication and computation costs. Moreover, the results obtained demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed scheme for secure demand response management in the SG.