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

Energy trading with electric vehicles provides opportunities to eliminate the high peak demand for electric vehicle charging while providing cost saving and profits for all participants. This work aims to design a framework for local energy trading with electric vehicles in smart parking lots where electric vehicles are able to exchange energy through buying and selling prices. The proposed architecture consists of four layers: the parking energy layer, data acquisition layer, communication network layer, and market layer. Electric vehicles are classified into three different types: seller electric vehicles (SEVs) with an excess of energy in the battery, buyer electric vehicles (BEVs) with lack of energy in the battery, and idle electric vehicles (IEVs). The parking lot control center (PLCC) plays a major role in collecting all available offer/demand information among parked electric vehicles. We propose a market mechanism based on the Knapsack Algorithm (KPA) to maximize the PLCC profit. Two cases are considered: electric vehicles as energy sellers and the PLCC as an energy buyer, and electric vehicles as energy buyers and the PLCC as an energy seller. A realistic parking pattern of a parking lot on a university campus is considered as a case study. Different scenarios are investigated with respect to the number of electric vehicles and amount of energy trading. The proposed market mechanism outperforms the conventional scheme in view of costs and profits.

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Blockchain for Electric Vehicles Energy Trading: Requirements, Opportunities, and Challenges

10.36227/techrxiv.16825303 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Nasser Al-Saif ◽

Raja Wasim Ahmad ◽

Khaled Salah ◽

Ibrar Yaqoob ◽

Raja Jayaraman ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Fault Tolerance ◽

Case Studies ◽

Electric Vehicles ◽

Single Point ◽

Data Provenance ◽

Successful Implementation ◽

Research Projects ◽

Energy Trading ◽

Blockchain Technology ◽

Trusted Data

Today's technologies, techniques, and systems leveraged for managing energy trading operations in electric vehicles fall short in providing operational transparency, immutability, fault tolerance, traceability, and trusted data provenance features. They are centralized and vulnerable to the single point of failure problem, and less trustworthy as they are prone to the data modifications and deletion by adversaries. In this paper, we present the potential advantages of blockchain technology to manage energy trading operations between electric vehicles as it can offer data traceability, immutability, transparency, audit, security, and confidentiality in a fully decentralized manner. We identify and discuss the essential requirements for the successful implementation of blockchain technology to secure energy trading operations among electric vehicles. We present a detailed discussion on the potential opportunities offered by blockchain technology to secure the energy trading operations of electric vehicles. We discuss several blockchain-based research projects and case studies to highlight the practicability of blockchain technology in electric vehicles energy trading. Finally, we identify and discuss open challenges in fulfilling the requirements of electric vehicles energy trading applications.

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