Communication-efficient privacy-preserving smart metering

The frequent reporting by smart meters may raise privacy concerns about the whereabouts of the consumers. There have been a number of privacy-preserving schemes proposed during the recent years, whereof most provide privacy-preserving aggregation of consumption values from groups of smart meters, while less provide privacy-preserving billing computations. An important aspect is transmission efficiency, since smart meter communication is usually wireless. Groups of smart meters form mesh networks, where the meters organize temporarily wireless paths where they forward messages on behalf of each other to and from the master meter or base station. Low transmission overhead is thus of high concern to reduce the amount of communication. Also of concern is resilience towards adversaries that are capable of compromising multiple meters. In this paper, we propose privacy-preserving schemes for consumption aggregation and billing that are communication-efficient and that provide (s-1)-resilience.