Blockchain-Based Energy Trading Scheme for EVs Coordination: A Smart Contract Approach

Abstract

The extensive deployment of electric vehicles (EVs) globally has become an alternative to fossil-fuel or gasoline vehicles to tackle harmful greenhouse gas emissions. But, huge EV charging demand can bring challenges to the charging infrastructure by destabilizing the grid stability and affecting efficient EV charging. Thus, the aforementioned challenges can be addressed by facilitating the energy trading (ET) between EVs which can act as prosumers or consumers. Thus, we have proposed a blockchain-based secure ET scheme for EVs coordination using Interplanetary File System (IPFS) protocol to mitigate the data storage cost issues of the blockchain. Opportunistically, we have considered various ET scenarios to coordinate the communication between prosumer and consumer based on the waiting time and priority levels. Moreover, the data communication between EVs is considered via a 5G communication network for highly reliable and efficient ET. Finally, the proposed scheme is evaluated by executing the smart contract using Remix Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with various performance metrics such as gas consumption (SF5 acquires maximum value of 186571 gas) and cost (execution (SF5 acquires maximum value of 120371 gas) and transaction cost (SF4 acquires maximum value of 124865 gas) ) analysis. Additionally, security analysis of the proposed scheme is tested using Echidna tool which shows the working of the smart contract without any vulnerability and bug.