Privacy-Preserving Transactive Energy Management for IoT-aided Smart Homes via Blockchain

TL;DR

This paper presents a blockchain-based transactive energy management system for IoT-enabled smart homes that enhances privacy, efficiency, and decentralization, enabling both grid and peer-to-peer energy transactions with reduced costs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel privacy-preserving distributed algorithm and a tailored blockchain system for holistic energy management in smart homes, addressing key limitations of existing methods.

Findings

System reduces overall energy management costs by 25%.

Proves feasibility of blockchain on practical IoT devices.

Enhances privacy and efficiency in transactive energy systems.

Abstract

With the booming of smart grid, The ubiquitously deployed smart meters constitutes an energy internet of things. This paper develops a novel blockchain-based transactive energy management system for IoT-aided smart homes. We consider a holistic set of options for smart homes to participate in transactive energy. Smart homes can interact with the grid to perform vertical transactions, e.g., feeding in extra solar energy to the grid and providing demand response service to alleviate the grid load. Smart homes can also interact with peer users to perform horizontal transactions, e.g., peer-to-peer energy trading. However, conventional transactive energy management method suffers from the drawbacks of low efficiency, privacy leakage, and single-point failure. To address these challenges, we develop a privacy-preserving distributed algorithm that enables users to optimally manage their energy usages in parallel via the smart contract on the blockchain. Further, we design an efficient blockchain system tailored for IoT devices and develop the smart contract to support the holistic transactive energy management system. Finally, we evaluate the feasibility and performance of the blockchain-based transactive energy management system through extensive simulations and experiments. The results show that the blockchain-based transactive energy management system is feasible on practical IoT devices and reduces the overall cost by 25%.