A novel distributed privacy-preserving control and data collection method for IoT-centric microgrids

The privacy of electricity consumers has become one of the most critical subjects in designing smart meters and their proliferation. In this work, a multilayer architecture has been proposed for anonymous data collection from smart meters, which provides: (1) The anonymity of information for third-party data consumers; (2) Secure communication to utility provider network for billing purposes; (3) Online control of data sharing for end-users; (4) Low communication costs based on available Internet of things (IoT) communication protocols. The core elements of this architecture are, first, the digital twin equivalent of the cyber-physical system and, second, the Tangle distributed ledger network with IOTA cryptocurrency. In this architecture, digital twin models are updated in real-time by information received from trusted nodes of the Tangle distributed network anonymously. A small-scale laboratory prototype based on this architecture has been developed using the dSPACE SCALEXIO real-time simulator and open-source software tools to prove the feasibility of the proposed solution. The numerical results confirm that after a few seconds of anomaly detection, the microgrid was fully stabilized around its operating point with less than 5% deviation during the transition time.