A Lightweight Smart Meter Framework using a Scalable Blockchain for Smart Cities
Joong-Lyul Lee, Prashanth Busireddygari, Brianna Thompson · 2021
The role of smart meters in the smart cities is becoming increasingly important. These smart meters are always connected to the network and this connectivity may leads to security risks. And, blockchain (BC) technology has recently received a lot of attention due to its data security stability and a distributed platform. BC has been applied to a plethora of different applications. However, BC requires high performance to be applied directly to a smart meter, which is an Internet of Things (IoT) device with low memory and slow CPU computation power. And, it cannot be scale up easily due to the nature of the distributed system. In order to compensate for this shortcoming, we propose a lightweight smart meter framework using BC technology, which is scalable and requires low computation power. In this proposed framework, data blockchain (dBC) and meta blockchain (mBC) are divided, and smart meters are divided into small groups to support scalability. The two proposed grouping algorithms are a delay-aware grouping algorithm that considers network delay and a random grouping algorithm that can improve security with a randomness. We also propose a new Enhanced Privacy Piggy Bank Protocol (EPPB) using bilinear pairing of cryptographic keys to authenticate the communicating parties for smart meters. We presented simulation results and security analysis to verify our proposed framework. From this simulation results, we can see that even if the number of smart meters increases, the performance is not affected.