Blockchain based crowdsourcing framework for Vehicle-to-Vehicle charging

Electric Vehicles (EVs) have become a promising solution to entirely replace traditional internal combustion engine vehicles. EV owners face the “Range Anxiety” problem which is the fear that their remaining charge would not be enough to reach their destination. Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) charging is currently being used in exchanging energy between EVs. Most of the existing energy V2V frameworks depend on a centralized server that manages the energy exchange. However, these solutions may suffer from privacy leakage and misbehaving platforms. To overcome these limitations, the paper proposes a blockchain-based crowdsourcing framework for V2V charging. The framework features include registering users, maintaining user information, clustering requesters (charging tasks), collecting preferences lists from requesters and providers, and lastly selecting the requester-provider charging pair as well as the corresponding meeting point. These features are implemented using three types of smart contracts: User Management Contract, Task Management Contract, and Solution Management Contract while guaranteeing the transparency of the system and overcoming the main limitations of the centralized solutions. Experiment results with real-life dataset show that the proposed framework achieves a comparable performance at reasonable paid costs and execution times.