Preserving privacy and efficiency in data communication and aggregation for AMI network

Due to the evolution of smart grid technologies, the number of smart meters deployed in a consumer area is rapidly increasing. As a consequence, network traffic issues in advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) have been raised. In smart gird, satisfying latency requirement and privacy-preserving are important issues. Intuitively, latency requirement can be met by reducing network delay and processing time. However, preserving privacy and security of user data has negative effects on both the network delay and the processing time due to the increased message size and cryptographic overhead. To overcome these problems, various types of message aggregation schemes with cryptographic algorithms have been proposed, but they have limitation in processing time and applicability to diverse scenarios. In this paper, we propose a data communication scheme for AMI network that can reduce the network traffic and the processing time while preserving each user's privacy. With the proposed scheme, the cryptographic overhead incurred during message aggregation can be significantly reduced compared to other existing schemes. We model the network characteristic, analyze the complexity of the proposed scheme, and simulate the proposed scheme under diverse topologies and application scenarios. Through the results, we show that the proposed scheme has lower computational overhead than other schemes, and it can be applied to various smart grid applications.