On Scaling Perturbation Based Privacy-Preserving Schemes in Smart Metering Systems

The smart grid poses great concern about the exposure of consumers´ privacy as the fine-grained measurements in the smart metering system can expose consumer´s privacy through the disclosure of accurate load profiles of home energy usage. To address this issue, in this paper we propose novel scaling perturbation based privacy-preserving schemes that can achieve great utility for fine-grained measurements in a privacy-friendly and cost-effective manner. Our schemes adopt the measurement-based scaling perturbation to hide original measurements with low cost. Through a combination of both extensive theoretical analysis and experiments, our results show that the proposed schemes can preserve consumers´ privacy through fine-grained measurements and achieve a better utility-privacy tradeoff in comparison with the existing schemes.