An Efficient and Secure Trading Framework for Shared Charging Service Based on Multiple Consortium Blockchains

While electric vehicles are proliferating rapidly, the number of charging piles is only 1/16 of the number of electric vehicles, showing big tension between small supply of public charging piles and intense charging demand of electric vehicles. To alleviate the tension, it is highly desired to incorporate existing idle private charging piles into a shared charging service. However, existing solutions do not well implement the system due to some non-negligible issues, like poor consensus performance or lack of verification for outputs from blockchain networks. In the article, we propose an efficient and secure trading framework built atop multiple consortium blockchains. It devises a novel node voting mechanism so as to improve consensus efficiency. Meanwhile, it employs a publicly verifiable design based on the $(t,n)$(t,n) Boneh-Lynn-Shacham (BLS) threshold signature technique, so as to enable entities outside the blockchain to verify the consistency between the output results with the valid consensus. Besides these novel system-level designs, it also introduces a fair and robust trading strategy running by smart contracts on the platform. Furthermore, we implemented a proof-of-concept system and conducted extensive experiments. The results show that the overall latency across chains is reduced by about 26% with the node voting mechanism and the transactions fees are comparable to recent popular cross-chain applications.

Automated summary

While the number of electric vehicles is increasing rapidly, the supply of public charging piles is insufficient. To address this issue, incorporating idle private charging piles into a shared charging service is crucial. However, existing solutions face challenges in terms of consensus performance and verification for blockchain outputs. In this article, we propose an efficient and secure trading framework built on multiple consortium blockchains, which includes a novel node voting mechanism for improved consensus efficiency and a publicly verifiable design based on the BLS threshold signature technique. The article also introduces a fair and robust trading strategy using smart contracts and presents experimental results demonstrating reduced latency and comparable transaction fees.