A Lightweight and Secure Energy Trading Framework for Electric Vehicles

Abstract

Recent advancements in smart grids (SGs) have introduced Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) networks as an emerging technology for electric power distribution networks. V2G provides more sophisticated energy trading by enabling bi-directional flow of electricity as well as communication channels between SGs and the electric vehicles (EVs). However, due to the huge daily volumes of trading data, the underlying V2G infrastructure suffers from scalability and security challenges. Therefore, new design principles are favorable to realize next generation of V2G networks. As distributed energy information networks are amongst the key desiderata of future power grids, the blockchain technology shows promising potential to facilitate decentralized power generation and local energy trading. Thus, we propose a framework that uses the distributed ledger and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) of a blockchain with a dynamic Proof-of-Work (dPoW) consensus for secure V2G energy trading. The ledger functions to execute transactions and thereafter, log them in the blockchain. With PKI, an authentication mechanism for EVs is established, whereas dPoW supports varying mining difficulty levels for a high throughput rate. To demonstrate the feasibility of our framework, security and performance analyses are presented, where the designed framework has been realized to preserve the privacy of EVs, support minimal computational overhead, and facilitate scalability in V2G networks.