**1. Introduction**

The Smart Grid (SG), is an enhancement of the 21st-century electrical grid, which is treated as a system that uses two-way communication. It includes information technologies (IT) and computational intelligence in an integrated way to address electricity generation, its transmission, and distribution to

achieve an electric system that is clean, secure, reliable, e fficient, and sustainable. The evolution of SGs relies heavily on the utilization and integration of modern IT for the development of new applications and services that can leverage the technological upgrades that are enabled by the advanced information system. This allows electric grid systems to work in smarter ways. However, an overwhelming amount of heterogeneous information is generated in the SG, mainly due to widely deployed monitoring, metering, measurement and control devices. This calls for a dominant and cost-e ffective information managemen<sup>t</sup> paradigm for data processing, analysis, and storage.

Our problem analysis is based on the situation in the regional state of Tamilnadu (India), where electric bills have to be produced for service payment, and the billing requires human intervention. In smart grids, the grid resource plays a significant role without the assistance of humans for such operations. The smart meters present in the SGs record the current energy utilization of users. Additionally, a remote gadget connected to the smart meter can send readings to a remote sink point at a specific time. The remote sink point is the cloud service, which gets the electronic reading from the gadget and creates a record in a database. Therefore, this paper suggests that the IT industry should be involved to assist in the information managemen<sup>t</sup> of the SG. More specifically, the paper explores how cloud computing (CC), a next-generation computing paradigm, can serve the information managemen<sup>t</sup> needs in the SG. The concept of CC is based on large data centers with massive computation and storage capacities operated by cloud providers, which deliver computing as a service. Shared resources, software, information, and storage are provided, with computers and other devices as a utility over a network. This SG information managemen<sup>t</sup> paradigm, in which the managemen<sup>t</sup> is (partially) accomplished via CC, is called Cloud Service (CS)-based SG Information Management [1].

Generally, the usage of electricity is measured by a human meter reader and later fed into the system manually. There can be errors during the reading process or when feeding the readings into the system, which makes the whole system error-prone. A cloud platform is one where there are multiple layers and services at di fferent layers, which can be broken up into three primary services:


These three services make up what Rackspace calls the Cloud Computing Stack, with SaaS on top, PaaS in the middle, and IaaS on the bottom. To access the service at di fferent layers, various restrictions can be enforced by the service provider [1]. The cloud consists of service providers who provide services in di fferent forms like infrastructure services, platform services, and software services. Each kind of service belongs to a layer of the cloud. This paper focuses on two di fferent layers, namely software and databases. The cloud services are a set of software interfaces through which legitimate users can access the cloud resource. The cloud is a loosely coupled environment where the cloud system does not know anything about the user and cannot trust the user easily. On a cloud platform, the data can be stored in any of the cloud servers and can be accessed through a set of available services.

The users of the cloud have been allowed to access the service, according to their trust level. Only a registered user is permitted to access the services and data. The trust in di fferent users is managed and verified using a Third Party Auditor (TPA) who maintains the details of users and their access permissions. Only if the TPA has verified the identity of a user successfully, he can access the service or data from the cloud [2]. The TPA, using various approaches, performs the authentication or verification of the users of the cloud. Each method has its demerits and deficiencies. Any security protocol faces di fferent network threats. However, the authentication algorithm should be more rigid and less time-complex one. The popular key-based approaches have the problem of the higher computational complexity of keys and their higher verification time. This encourages the invention of rigid verification algorithms.

In this paper, to ensure the regular provision of power, a user-aware power regulation method is proposed, which is updated regarding the usage of current meter readings via smart meters. The entire electrical data is updated to the cloud. Depending on the power usage of a user, the proposed power regulatory model provides directions to the user to cut/reduce their power consumption. However, no such service or idea is provided in the existing literature. Additionally, the authors use a location-based service selection scheme to reduce the time complexity. The main novelty of the proposed method involves finding the users who use auditing service and have been cleared by the auditing service and then the way performs service selection, which is explained in detail in Section 3.
