BESTS: Blockchain-enabled electric vehicles scheduling and coordination scheme at charging station

Abstract

The proliferation of electric vehicles (EVs) in the automobile industry has become a prominent alternative to fossil-fuel vehicles by facilitating energy sustainability for a greener environment. Nevertheless, secure and efficient EV charging coordination is still one of the critical aspects that can bring various privacy challenges during the communication between EVs and charging station (CS) for charging. Towards this goal, we have proposed a blockchain-based EV scheduling scheme for coordinated charging at the CS, i.e., BESTS. To attain this, we formulate various EV scheduling scenarios based on their energy demands and different type of EVs (emergency, high authority, and regular) to allocate EVs at a CS over the fifth generation (5G) communication network and InterPlanetary file system (IPFS) protocol. Both 5G and IPFS offers cost-efficient, low latency, and highly reliable transactions for EV charging allocation at a CS. Moreover, we highlighted various smart contract functionalities of the proposed BESTS scheme executed in the remix integrated development environment (IDE) for EV charging allocation based on the available charging slots at the CS. The security aspect of the proposed BESTS scheme is evaluated and verified with the Echidna fuzzy property-based tool, which reflects that the smart contract is not having any vulnerability. Finally, the performance evaluation of the blockchain-based EV scheduling scheme is simulated considering various performance metrics such as gas consumption and cost analysis for the type of EVs and smart contract functions, gas consumption analysis for the number of EVs, and bit error rate.