A Secure and Efficient Wireless Charging Scheme for Electric Vehicles in Vehicular Energy Networks

To address the limited driving range of electric vehicles (EVs) and promote EVs’ penetration, vehicular energy networks (VENs) have emerged and opened possibility to charge EVs in motion via dynamic wireless power transfer (DWPT) technology. However, security and efficiency concerns arise due to the untrusted operating environment and EVs’ selfish charging/discharging behaviors. Existing trust models rely on the personal recommendations from neighboring EVs to identify malicious entities in VENs, which may cause potential privacy breaches and data misuse for recommenders. Besides, it is challenging to optimally schedule EVs’ energy behaviors by considering complex interactions among three energy entities (i.e., energy nodes, charging EVs, and discharging EVs). To this end, by leveraging blockchain technology and game theory, this paper proposes a secure and efficient wireless charging scheme to address these issues in VENs. Firstly, a blockchain-based fine-grained access control mechanism with traceability and auditability is presented to enable EV users to fully control and audit their personal rating data usage during trust management by logging data activities and issuing access tokens into decentralized ledgers. In this manner, the privacy of recommenders can be preserved by fully controlling the access and usage of personal rating data. Furthermore, by introducing cooperative wireless energy transfer mode, a hierarchical game-based energy scheduling algorithm is developed to optimize the strategies of three energy parties tier by tier, while considering their cooperation and competition. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted, which demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively improve users’ utility and security of energy transmission for EVs, compared with existing representative approaches.