On M2M Micropayments: A Case Study of Electric Autonomous Vehicles

The proliferation of electric vehicles (EVs) has spurred the research interest in technologies associated with it, for instance batteries, and charging mechanisms. Moreover, the recent advancements in autonomous cars also encourage the enabling technologies to integrate and provide holistic applications. To this end, one key requirement for EVs is to have an efficient, secure, and scalable infrastructure and framework for charging, billing, and auditing. However, the current manual charging systems for EVs may not be applicable to the autonomous cars that demand new, automatic, secure, efficient, and scalable billing and auditing mechanism. Owing to the distributed systems such as blockchain technology, in this paper, we propose a new charging and billing mechanism for electric vehicles that charge their batteries in a charging-on-the-move fashion. To meet the requirements of billing in electric vehicles, we leverage distributed ledger technology (DLT), a distributed peer-to-peer technology for micro-transactions. Our proof-of-concept implementation of the billing framework demonstrates the feasibility of such system in electric vehicles. It is also worth noting that the solution can easily be extended to the electric autonomous cars (EAVs).