Secure Low Cost FPGA-based AMI System using LTE Technology

The smart grid is seen as the greatest technological invention—in the context of energy supply—since the grid connection of millions of households. Household smart meters that measure power consumption in real-time at fine granularities are the foundation of a future smart electricity grid. As smart meters are spreading into more and more households, electricity customers are directly affected by the technology. However, the widespread deployment of smart meters has serious privacy implications since they inadvertently leak detailed information about household activities.This paper presents the design and implementation of a secure low cost FPGA-based prototype for smart meter in automatic meter infrastructure (AMI) system that precisely measures the use of residential energy and instantaneously transmits the reading to concentrator using 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology. Also, we explore the feasibility of designing physical-layer privacy-preserving smart meters using direct sequence spread spectrum. The proposed smart meter consists of three main parts: Accurate digital meter, encryption scheme and transmission facility.