A scalable, efficient, and secured consensus mechanism for Vehicle-to-Vehicle energy trading blockchain

Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) energy trading has emerged as a promising scheme to relieve the load imposed on the grid without intermediaries. The blockchain has always been regarded as the most potential solution for addressing the security and privacy issues of the Internet of Electric Vehicles (IoEV). The consensus mechanism is the core of the blockchain, it determines the security, efficiency, and scalability of the system. However, consensus mechanisms currently employed in V2V energy trading are traditional algorithms, which are unsuitable for the IoEV due to their high computational power and communication overhead. Therefore, we are motivated to propose a Block Alliance Consensus (BAC) mechanism based on Hashgraph. BAC can maintain the high throughput of the Hashgraph, and it solves the problem that the Hashgraph cannot support the dynamic addition and deletion of nodes if it is directly applied to V2V energy trading. We utilize the sharding technique, and each shard generates a consortium blockchain in accordance with the characteristic of the IoEV. The centralized component is retained to ensure macroeconomic control by state and local governments. We design a cryptography-based leader election combined with a reputation incentive mechanism to fairly elect centralized leader committee and motivate honest electric vehicles (EVs). We implement the BAC consensus and V2V energy trading blockchain (ETB) on the Hyperledger Fabric. The performance and practicality of BAC and the V2V ETB are verified through experiments. & COPY; 2023 Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).