Privacy-preserving metering in smart grid for billing, operational metering, and incentive-based schemes: A survey

We reviewed 53 papers related to privacy-preserving metering in smart grid published in the last 9 years. Attribution is the main cause for privacy issues in smart metering. Hence, we categorized studies based on measurements' type: attributable or not. Utility Providers (UPs) use power measurements for two reasons: billing and maintaining operations. (A) Billing always requires attributable measurements. There are two main research problems for billing. (A-1) using coarse-grained measurements, which have minimal privacy concerns. (A-2) using fine-grained measurements, which have high privacy concerns. (B) Operational metering requires fine-grained measurements to maintain UPs' operations. There are two main research problems for operational metering. (B-1) Protect users' privacy when submitting non-attributable fine-grained measurements. Users might be reluctant to submit this type of measurements due to privacy concerns. Hence, UPs might offer incentive for users to shape their power usage (i.e. Incentive-based demand response (IDR)) or provide the fine-grained measurement (i.e. rewarding schemes). We refer to IDR and rewarding schemes as incentive-based schemes (they are sub-problems of the operational metering problem). They lead to the second research problem that addresses (B-2) protecting attributable fine-grained measurements used for operational metering. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.