UAV-enabled edge computing and blockchain based secure charging station selection for energy trading in V2G environment

Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) networks have emerged as a promising solution in the modern electric power transmission network. By leveraging the bidirectional energy trading capabilities of V2G, demand-supply mismatch is managed in wide range of applications. However, performing energy trading decisions at cloud centers leads to increased delay and overhead. The demand to process the 3V's (variety, volume, and velocity) of data generated by V2G with low latency necessitates the usage of edge computing services. Although with the growth of edge computing resources, the trust issue of collaboration also grows among different stakeholders and service providers. Therefore, to deal with the aforementioned issues, this paper presents blockchain and UAV-enabled edge computing based energy trading services for the V2G environment. The decision of selecting a charging station (CS) by an electric vehicle (EV) is processed close to the EV movement via edge nodes. To secure and validate energy trading transactions and automation of the whole system, the blockchain technology is used in the proposal. The result section depicts that the proposed scheme has minimal computational and communicational overhead along with reduced latency in comparison to the existing schemes.