Differentially Private State Estimation in Distribution Networks with Smart Meters

State estimation is routinely being performed in high-voltage power transmission grids in order to assist in operation and to detect faulty equipment. In low- and medium-voltage power distribution grids, on the other hand, few real-time measurements are traditionally available, and operation is often conducted based on predicted and historical data. Today, in many parts of the world, smart meters have been deployed at many customers, and their measurements could in principle be shared with the operators in real time to enable improved state estimation. However, customers may feel reluctance in doing so due to privacy concerns. We therefore propose state estimation schemes for a distribution grid model, which ensure differential privacy to the customers. In particular, the state estimation schemes optimize different performance criteria, and a trade-off between a lower bound on the estimation performance versus the customers' differential privacy is derived. The proposed framework is general enough to be applicable also to other distribution networks, such as water and gas networks

Communication and Interference Coordination

We study the problem of controlling the interference created to an external observer by a communication processes. We model the interference in terms of its type (empirical distribution), and we analyze the consequences of placing constraints on the admissible type. Considering a single interfering link, we characterize the communication-interference capacity region. Then, we look at a scenario where the interference is jointly created by two users allowed to coordinate their actions prior to transmission. In this case, the trade-off involves communication and interference as well as coordination. We establish an achievable communication-interference region and show that efficiency is significantly improved by coordination

Finding Cures for Tropical Diseases: Is Open Source an Answer?

We construct polar codes for binary relay channels with orthogonal receiver components. We show that polar codes achieve the cut-set bound when the channels are symmetric and the relay-destination link supports compress-and-forward relaying based on Slepian-Wolf coding. More generally, we show that a particular version of the compress-and-forward rate is achievable using polar codes for Wyner-Ziv coding. In both cases the block error probability can be bounded as O(2-Nβ) for 0 &lt; β &lt; 1/2 and sufficiently large block length N.Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. QC 20111207</p

Performance Analysis and Design of Two Edge Type LDPC Codes for the BEC Wiretap Channel

We consider transmission over a wiretap channel where both the main channel and the wiretapper's channel are Binary Erasure Channels (BEC). We propose a code construction method using two edge type LDPC codes based on the coset encoding scheme. Using a standard LDPC ensemble with a given threshold over the BEC, we give a construction for a two edge type LDPC ensemble with the same threshold. If the given standard LDPC ensemble has degree two variable nodes, our construction gives rise to degree one variable nodes in the code used over the main channel. This results in zero threshold over the main channel. In order to circumvent this problem, we numerically optimize the degree distribution of the two edge type LDPC ensemble. We find that the resulting ensembles are able to perform close to the boundary of the rate-equivocation region of the wiretap channel. There are two performance criteria for a coding scheme used over a wiretap channel: reliability and secrecy. The reliability measure corresponds to the probability of decoding error for the intended receiver. This can be easily measured using density evolution recursion. However, it is more challenging to characterize secrecy, corresponding to the equivocation of the message for the wiretapper. M\'easson, Montanari, and Urbanke have shown how the equivocation can be measured for a broad range of standard LDPC ensembles for transmission over the BEC under the point-to-point setup. By generalizing the method of M\'easson, Montanari, and Urbanke to two edge type LDPC ensembles, we show how the equivocation for the wiretapper can be computed. We find that relatively simple constructions give very good secrecy performance and are close to the secrecy capacity. However finding explicit sequences of two edge type LDPC ensembles which achieve secrecy capacity is a more difficult problem. We pose it as an interesting open problem.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Updated versio