A Blockchain-Based Privacy-Preserving Payment Mechanism for Vehicle-to-Grid Networks

As an integral part of V2G networks, EVs receive electricity from not only the grid but also other EVs and may frequently feed the power back to the grid. Payment records in V2G networks are useful for extracting user behaviors and facilitating decision-making for optimized power supply, scheduling, pricing, and consumption. Sharing payment and user information, however, raises serious privacy concerns in addition to the existing challenge of secure and reliable transaction processing. In this article, we propose a blockchain-based privacy preserving payment mechanism for V2G networks, which enables data sharing while securing sensitive user information. The mechanism introduces a registration and data maintenance process that is based on a blockchain technique, which ensures the anonymity of user payment data while enabling payment auditing by privileged users. Our design is implemented based on Hyperledger to carefully evaluate its feasibility and effectiveness.