UT Research Team Proposes New Protocol for Safe Electric Meter Data Aggregation

According to the report published by the UT School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, smart electricity distribution networks currently use automated systems for such tasks as reading electric meter registers and relaying the meter readings for the monthly billing period, which were previously carried out by humans.

The advent of smart technology has made possible online meter register reading and regular transmission of reports—for instance, once every ten minutes—to the central station. Apart from facilitating the billing process, this could put into effect the online management of electricity production and consumption demand.

However, if the metered information of the customers is continuously transmitted to the central station, the privacy of the customers could be jeopardized. Accordingly, the proposed protocol in the research study utilizes homomorphic encryption through the enroute aggregation of the usage data of clusters of customers by intermediate substations. The aggregated data can be accurately processed and computed without the need to have access to the metered information of every single customer. 

Dr. Mohammad Sayyad Haghigh and Amin Mohammadali jointly conducted this research study, which was published in IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid.

Please click here to view the published article.