Secure and Reliable Power Consumption Monitoring in Untrustworthy Micro-grids

Micro-grid architectures based on renewable energy sources offer a viable solution to electricity provision in regions that are not connected to the national power grid or that are severely affected by load shedding. The limited power generated in micro-grids however makes monitoring power consumption an important consideration in guaranteeing efficient and fair energy sharing. A further caveat is that adversarial data tampering poses a major impediment to fair energy sharing on small scale energy systems, like micro-grids, and can result in a complete breakdown of the system. In this paper, we present an innovative approach to monitoring home power consumption in smart micro-grids. This is done by taking into account power consumption measurement on a per appliance and/or device basis. Our approach works by employing a distributed snapshot algorithm to asynchronously collect the power consumption data reported by the appliances and devices. In addition, we provide a characterization of noise that affects the quality of the data making it difficult to differentiate measurement errors and power fluctuations from deliberate attempts to misreport consumption.