Performance analysis of a blockchain enabled domestic power consumption monitoring and forecasting system

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop a blockchain-based data capture and transmission system that will collect real-time power consumption data from a household electrical appliance and transfer it securely to a local server for energy analytics such as forecasting. Design/methodology/approach The data capture system is composed of two current transformer (CT) sensors connected to two different electrical appliances. The CT sensors send the power readings to two Arduino microcontrollers which in turn connect to a Raspberry-Pi for aggregating the data. Blockchain is then enabled onto the Raspberry-Pi through a Java API so that the data are transmitted securely to a server. The server provides real-time visualization of the data as well as prediction using the multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and long short term memory (LSTM) algorithms. Findings The results for the blockchain analysis demonstrate that when the data readings are transmitted in smaller blocks, the security is much greater as compared with blocks of larger size. To assess the accuracy of the prediction algorithms data were collected for a 20 min interval to train the model and the algorithms were evaluated using the sliding window approach. The mean average percentage error (MAPE) was used to assess the accuracy of the algorithms and a MAPE of 1.62% and 1.99% was obtained for the LSTM and MLP algorithms, respectively. Originality/value A detailed performance analysis of the blockchain-based transmission model using time complexity, throughput and latency as well as energy forecasting has been performed.