Privacy-preserving power request and trading by prepayment in smart grid

Demand response has been intensively studied in recent years. It can motivate customers to change their consumption patterns according to the dynamic (time-varying) electricity price, which is considered to be the most cost-effective and reliable solution for smoothing the demand curve. However, many existing schemes, based on users' demand request in each period, require users to consume their requested electricity exactly, which sometimes causes inconvenience and losses to the utility, as customers may send inaccurate demand accidently and will be punished. In this paper, we tackle this problem in a novel approach. Instead of charging after consumption, we adopt a well-designed prepayment mechanism to implement power request. Furthermore, we propose a trading market run by the control center to cope with the dynamics of users' demand. It is worth noting that both users' original demand and trading records are protected against potential adversaries including the control center. Through the numerical simulation, we demonstrate that our scheme is highly efficient in both computation and communication.