A secure data analytics scheme for multimedia communication in a decentralized smart grid

With the exponential increase in energy demands (commercial as well as residential), the traditional grid infrastructure significantly shifted to intelligent ICT-based Smart Grid (SG) infrastructure. In the SG environment, only efficient energy management may not be sufficient as the SG dynamics have significant impacts on multimedia communications such as video surveillance of the technical/non-technical losses of energy and many more. The inevitable energy losses can be identified by process and analyze the massive amount of heterogeneous data, i.e., Big Data (BD) generated through smart devices such as sensors, Smart Meters (SMs), and others. The key challenges in analyzing multimedia BD are computational complexity, operational integration complexity, data security, and privacy. To overcome the aforementioned issues, this paper proposes a blockchain-based data analytics scheme called ChoIce, which offers secure data collection, analysis, and decision support for the SG systems. It works in two phases; (i) secure data collection over Ethereum and (ii) BD analytics and decision-making using deep learning (DL). The robust and secure data analytics, efficient network management, and high-performance computing for BD are crucial towards the optimization of SG operation. The performance of ChoIce is evaluated considering parameters such as the data storage cost, multimedia communication latency, and prediction accuracy. Thus, the results of ChoIce shows that it outperforms in contrast to other state-of-the-art approaches.