Towards an IPFS-based highly scalable blockchain for PEV charging and achieve near super-stability in a V2V environment

Electric vehicles (EVs) are the most promising future transportation system, and most of the public and private combustion vehicles used are already being replaced by them. In any urban road network, the number of EVs requesting to be charged will increase exponentially in the coming years beyond the capabilities of charging stations alone. The provision for bi-directional plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) is already a well-established phenomenon in the literature with energy exchange in a to-and-fro manner, as it can facilitate vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V)-based charging under an energy trading network (ETN). In this work, we propose a V2V-based energy trading framework for dense urban areas. The network is partitioned based on PEV trip data, battery health, and charge availability. Charging/discharging is modeled using a bipartite graph, with a rational matching variant maximizing PEV and hotspot utility. To execute V2V energy trading safely, blockchain technology is proposed, featuring a consensus protocol addressing scalability. A new consensus algorithm, SaPPoA, considers Sharded A-PBFT and delegated proof-of-authority, providing high scalability through a Chord-DHT-enabled IPFS overlay. This blockchain-based ETN ensures effectiveness and security in a dedicated V2I communication infrastructure. Experiments are used to demonstrate the efficiency and security of SaPPoA and our blockchain-based V2V energy trading platform.