Blockchain-based Networking Strategy for Privacy-Preserving Demand Side Management

Demand side management (DSM) presents an effective tool to regulate customers' energy consumption. However, DSM requires customer-utility interaction based on fine-grained data, which jeopardizes the privacy of the customers. To overcome such a threat, several proposals are made based on noise addition, encryption techniques, or extra hardware. Unfortunately, these solutions either impact the integrity of the data, incur additional computational complexity, or add extra cost. Recently, blockchain has been adopted to support smart grid applications while promoting customer's anonymity. However, special measures are yet to be taken to support both customer's anonymity and data unlinkability, hence preserving the customer's privacy. This paper achieves this goal by proposing a novel networking strategy based on a private blockchain. The proposed strategy employs a group signature to ensure the customer's anonymity and data unlinkability. Further, a novel decentralized random number generation scheme is proposed to support customer-utility interaction for DSM, billing, and auditing while ensuring data unlinkability. We present an implementation of the proposed blockchain-based strategy, investigate its scalability, and provide low-bound empirical expressions on computational time and storage overhead.