A Privacy-Preserving Distributed Smart Metering Temporal and Spatial Aggregation Scheme

A distributed temporal and spatial aggregation scheme for privacy-preserving smart metering is presented. This scheme preserves the privacy of fine-grained utility usage data of individual users while reporting: 1) spatially aggregated utility usage data of a community at fine-grained time steps (e.g., minutes) and 2) temporally aggregated utility usage data of individual users to the utility company over a billing period (e.g., a month). Each meter privately partitions the fine-grained utility data into $k$ partitions and sends them to (homomorphically encrypted) $k-1$ pairwise smart meters in the community, while keeping the remaining for itself. A smart meter will report to the aggregator, a locally aggregated usage amount of its own and of all its pairwise nodes at the fine-grained time scale allowing community-wide spatial aggregation at the aggregator without revealing individual fine-grained usage data. A smart meter will temporally aggregate usage data from each of its pairwise nodes and transmit it to the aggregator where the overall temporal aggregation will be performed by each smart meter. Our scheme not only can prevent privacy theft from external attackers but also is resilient to internal attacks by a subset of smart meters or even colluding gateway aggregator and the control center. This is a distinct advantage of our scheme over existing works without incurring any computation and communication overheads.