Enhanced Proof-of-Benefit: A Secure Blockchain-Enabled EV Charging System

The emergence of blockchain technology brings opportunities for the transactional energy to minimize the time gap and cost in the trading process. This paper proposes a public power exchange service network for Electric Vehicles (EV) to charge and discharge from the power grid. An enhanced novel consensus mechanism Proof-of-Benefit (ePoB) is proposed to improve the protocol security and performance of the electricity exchange system. Furthermore, the benefit number generation algorithm for choosing the leader in the network guarantees the overall power grid network performance by minimizing the load variance. Through theoretical and experimental analysis, the public power exchange system with ePoB consensus protocol achieves higher scalability than Proof- of-Work (PoW) and Paxo-based or BFT-based consensus protocols. Also, it demonstrates that the consensus protocol is capable of withstanding the Sybil attack while achieving lower power load fluctuation level compared with the benchmark.