Resilient and decentralized demand-side management in smart grids using blockchain

Recent advancements in information and communication technologies, along with electronic services such as smart metering for billing, energy management in smart buildings, and electric vehicle charging and discharging systems, are widely adopted by consumers. In this setting, devices inform the utility center of their energy requirements to aid in matching demand with supply. The utility center efficiently manages these needs, distributing them to end-users and overseeing the demand component. However, the transmission of end-user energy data through the Internet discloses the exchanged information between Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the utility center. This framework leads to vulnerabilities, including data manipulation, service interruptions, and insufficient transparency. To address these challenges, researchers implemented centralized demand-side management, which has a single point of failure. Consequently, a decentralized authentication system is required to guarantee security and robustness against threats. Hence, in this paper, we propose a blockchain-based demand-side management scheme that incorporates mutual authentication between IoT devices and the utility centre. The security evaluation is verified using the automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) tool of our proposed scheme. The performance analysis, comparing metrics such as computation time and communication cost, demonstrates the superiority of the proposed scheme over existing state-of-the-art approaches.