An Efficient Implementation of a Blockchain-Based Smart Grid

Abstract

The usage of smart grid is increasing rapidly in the current era of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and internet of things (IoT). There are security and privacy challenges involved in realizing smart grid and there is always a question on the reliability aspect of it. Blockchain is considered to be the technology that provides security without the need of central authority. Therefore, securing smart grid through blockchain is proposed in this chapter. Other aspect that is challenging is the integration of the renewable energy sources in the supply system of energy. The idea of private blockchain (Ethereum) is used in the literature to provide a fair and user-centric way, for energy consumers and producers to get involved in the energy trading. As blockchain supports a distributed ledger and multi-factor verification, it enhances the trust and data integrity of energy transactions. In order to reduce the number of messages required to be communicated, the concept of data aggregation is used in the smart grid. However, this brings the danger of the control center to accept wrong results if the smart meters of the smart grid network become malicious and alter the actual readings. The privacy of the smart meter’s data is also crucial as revealing the same reveals the entire lifestyle of the consumer, for example, when they eat, sleep, take bath, whether they are at home or not, etc. The pseudonymity aspect for the identities in blockchain helps in achieving user’s privacy, if applied to smart grid. Moreover, the tracking of distributed energy generation through renewable energy sources is possible if blockchain-based smart grid is realized. Smart 170contracts are written for the purpose of enabling automated execution of the rules defined in the blockchain by the users. The smart grid uses such smart contracts for the purpose of transacting the energy. The blockchain is designed to consider serial execution by miners and validators for the purpose of adding a new block in the blockchain. However, the concurrent execution of the same can save time as well as energy of both the validators and the miners. Therefore, we propose a model based on the software transactional memory (object based in particular) that enables smart contracts to run in a parallel fashion. The miners use multithreading to execute smart contracts in parallel and add a block in the blockchain in order to achieve final state of the blockchain. There are chances that the order of execution by the validators is different from miners while applying multithreading, which can lead to inconsistency. However, the concept of block graph is used in order to avoid such inconsistency issues. The guaranteed speedups (both at the miner and the validator side) are achieved with the help of executing the smart contracts through the protocols like Basic Timestamp Ordering (BTO) and Multi-version Timestamp Ordering. According to our knowledge, the proposal in this chapter is the first of its kind that incorporates the idea of software transactional memory based blockchain in smart grid, and achieves guaranteed speed ups in execution (i.e., efficiency) and advantages of trust and security of blockchain all together.