EVBlocks: A Blockchain-Based Secure Energy Trading Scheme for Electric Vehicles underlying 5G-V2X Ecosystems

Abstract

In this paper, the authors propose a secure and trusted energy trading (ET) scheme for electric vehicles (EVs) for vehicle-to-anything (V2X) ecosystems. The scheme, named as EVBlocks, facilitates ET among entities (i.e., EVs, charging stations (CS), and smart grids (SG)) in a secured and trusted manner through a consortium blockchain (CBC) network. The scheme operates in three phases. In the first phase, to allow real-time and resilient network orchestration of V2X nodes, we consider the ET service designed over a fifth-generation (5G) enabled software-defined networking (SDN) environment. Integration of SDN in 5G-V2X ecosystems allows V2X nodes to eliminate intermediaries and handle many requests with a minimum response time. Then, in the second phase, a non-cooperative game is presented that optimizes a cost function and converges to reach at least one Nash equilibrium point. Finally, a consensus algorithm Proof-of-Greed (PoG) is proposed that handles fluctuations in charging/discharging EVs through an event-driven scheduling mechanism. The obtained results are compared against parameters, such as ET time, State-of-Charge (SoC) levels, EV utility, block-convergence time, profits, computation, and communication costs. For example, EVBlocks achieve an average SOC charge of 22.8MW, with a peak at 377.5MW, the average power dissipation of 4.1125 kWH that is lower than 25% against existing conventional and fixed tariff schemes. The scheme converges at stable profit values for 5 EVs through a non-cooperative game. For proposed PoG consensus, the block convergence time for 1000 nodes is 138.96 seconds, at a computation cost of 46.92 milliseconds (ms) and communication cost of 149 bytes. The comparative analysis suggests the proposed scheme is efficient as compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches against compared parameters.