Privacy-preserving prepayment based power request and trading in smart grid

Demand response has been intensively studied in recent years. It can motivate customers to change their consumption patterns according to the dynamic (time-varying) electricity price, which is considered to be the most cost-effective and reliable solution for smoothing the demand curve. However, many existing schemes, based on users' demand request in each period, require users to consume their requested electricity exactly, which sometimes causes inconvenience and losses to the utility, because customers cannot always be able to consume the accurate electricity demand due to various personal reasons. In this paper, we tackle this problem in a novel approach. Instead of charging after consumption, we adopt the prepayment mechanism to implement power request. Furthermore, we propose a trading market running by the control center to cope with the users' dynamic demand. It is noteworthy that both users' original demand and trading records are protected against potential adversaries including the curious control center. Through the numerical simulation, we demonstrate that our scheme is highly efficient in both computation and communication.