BlockEV: Efficient and Secure Charging Station Selection for Electric Vehicles

The Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) has become essential for the economical and technological development of a country. The maturity of communication technologies (Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V)) and the amalgamation of smart grids, electric vehicles (EVs) and energy trading resulted in a storm of research opportunities for green ITS. In addition, the combination of vehicular communication technologies and ITS enable efficient selection of EV charging stations (CS) and scheduling EVs charging requirements in real-time. However, the untrusted centralized nature of energy markets and EV charging infrastructures result in several privacy and security threats to EV user's private information. These security and privacy threats include targeted advertisements, privacy leakage, selling data to third party, etc. In this work, we propose BlockEV, a blockchain-based efficient CS selection protocol for EVs to ensure the security and privacy of the EV users, availability of the reserved time slots at CSs, high Quality of Service (QoS) and enhanced EV user comfort. First, a blockchain-based framework is introduced to implement secure charging services and trusted reservation for EVs with the execution of smart contract. Second, we focus on the efficient CS selection and propose a mechanism for EVs to select the CS locally without sharing private information to CS, while fulfilling their service requirements. Evaluations show that the proposed BlockEV is scalable with significantly low blockchain transaction and storage overhead.

Automated summary

The Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) plays an essential role in the economic and technological development of a country, especially with the rise of green ITS research opportunities driven by communication technology maturity and the integration of smart grids and electric vehicles (EVs). However, the untrusted centralized nature of energy markets and EV charging infrastructures poses privacy and security threats to EV user’s private information, leading to the proposal of BlockEV as a blockchain-based solution to address these issues.