**1. Introduction**

The term power grid is commonly referred to as an electricity distribution system that supplies energy to a territory. A power grid actually comprises power generation, distribution, and transmission [1]. The traditional power grid just supplies energy to the consumer which results in simplified managemen<sup>t</sup> but at the cost of short falls when supply and demand do not catch up. There are certain limitations of the traditional grid such as the losses at transmission lines and lack of information, or we can say that lack of demand knowledge, which further leads to inefficient power managemen<sup>t</sup> [2,3]. For example, the traditional grid feeds constant power during peak and off peak hours. To overcome the limitations of the traditional power grid, certain changes must be made in traditional grid [4]. The power sector needs to be revolutionized to meet the needs of modern living. A smart grid promises to replace the traditional grid with better performance and is also open enough to meet the upcoming revolution in the power sector. The SG consists of a power generation unit, power transmission and distribution units, smart meter (SM), smart homes, smart energy managemen<sup>t</sup> systems, and smart appliances [5]. The communication among power generation, transmission, distribution, and customers is usually a two way communication managed by the CC and service provider enabling real time communications between consumers and the utility/service provider [6,7].

An SM senses the energy consumption of a home and sends it to a substation or the gateway or control room of that region. There may be a number of devices between the SM and service provider. The SM reports the energy consumption about every 15 min to the service provider [8]. The control room receives data from all the SMs in the neighborhood and transmits the combined energy usage report to the control center. The control center uses the consumption report to run load managemen<sup>t</sup> and power distribution and uses the information for billing purposes [9]. Abbreviations contains all the terminologies and their definition used in the paper.

**Citation:** Ali, W.; Din, I.U.; Almogren, A.; Kim, B.-S. A Novel Privacy Preserving Scheme for Smart Grid-Based Home Area Networks. *Sensors* **2022**, *22*, 2269. https:// doi.org/10.3390/s22062269

Academic Editor: Raffaele Bruno

Received: 3 December 2021 Accepted: 14 March 2022 Published: 15 March 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

### *1.1. Architecture of Smart Grid*

Smart grid refers to the electricity distribution network that uses communication channels to detect any change in local power usage and acts accordingly without external interference. It uses smart home appliances, SM, and green energy resources. The smart grid utilizes a two-way communication channel and allows consumer to interact with the grid. It facilitates the consumers, service provider, and governmen<sup>t</sup> establishment by overcoming the drawbacks of traditional grid. It reduces the energy consumption and decreases the consumer's cost of electricity by smart means.
