Secure and efficient protection of consumer privacy in Advanced Metering Infrastructure supporting fine-grained data analysis

The Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) plays a critical role in the Smart Grid. In regarding the usage of smart meters in AMI, there is a primary concern about how utility companies manage energy consumption data, particularly with respect to consumer privacy. This research presents a novel protocol for secure and efficient communication of energy consumption data, protecting its confidentiality, integrity, and privacy while utilizing the existing Grid infrastructure. The protocol supports time-of-use billing and data mining for advanced fine-grained data analysis. We report on the empirical results of the theoretical, experimental, and comparative analyses of the proposed protocol.