Intelligent and Fair IoV Charging Service Based on Blockchain With Cross-Area Consensus

The emergence of electric vehicles promotes the development of Internet of Vehicle (IoV). However, there are a series of security problems to be solved in the IoV. Firstly, how to allow vehicle users to find the nearest non-queuing charging pile without detours is a challenge. Secondly, applications in the IoV are delay-sensitive, while high communication delays caused by security mechanisms would bring serious consequences to vehicles. Thirdly, the verifiability and fairness between charging and payment are difficult to be guaranteed. Aiming at the efficiency and security problems of the charging service in the IoV, this paper proposes a blockchain-based intelligent and fair IoV charging service system. According to the multi-factor constraints between vehicles and charging piles, a multi-factor IoV branch and bound algorithm is proposed to intelligently recommend charging piles for vehicles and maximize the overall energy saving. We propose the cross-area consensus protocol to achieve low latency in vehicle communication. In addition, we ensure the fairness between charging and payment through a payment channel protocol based on verifiable encrypted signatures. Finally, we implement the proposed scheme, and we put the project prototype on an open source platform is available at: https://github.com/chenruonan/blockchain-based-intelligent-and-fair-IoV-charging-service-protocol. The experimental results demonstrate the low latency and energy-saving advantages of our proposal. When the payment is executed 250 times, the delay of our proposal is only 1.54% of the normal on-chain payment time.