EVaaS: Electric vehicle-as-a-service for energy trading in SDN-enabled smart transportation system6

The increased adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) in the daily life of consumers have led towards the emergence of greener smart cities. However, the problem of energy stability, i.e., balancing the demand and supply, remains persistent in the context of charging stations (CSs). To solve this problem, a unique conceptual solution using EVs has been presented in this paper. The proposed solution deals with the problem of managing the miscellaneous power or power deficit at the CSs by utilizing EVs-as-a-service (EVaaS). On one hand, EVaaS provides opportunities to the owner of EVs to earn profit and on the other hand, it helps to balance the demand and supply at the CSs. This concept works in two steps; (1) EV-as-a-buyer: EVs act as energy buyers and CSs act as energy sellers, and (2) EV-as-a-seller: EVs act as energy sellers and CSs act as energy buyers. In EVaaS paradigm, the CSs are placed in residential, commercial, and industrial areas which broadcast their price for buying (or selling) the deficit (or excess) power from (or to) the EVs. The EVs would then decide whether to charge (or discharge) their battery power from (or at) which CSs based on the factors such as–price and distance. If both the parties come to an agreement, then the EVs would travel to the specified location and exchange the energy with CSs. For the smooth movement of EVs in the smart city, a mobility model is also designed. In addition, this approach also utilizes the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm for enabling faster communication between the entities involved. For this purpose, a flow management scheme is designed for efficient data transfer between EVs and CSs. Through this study, it has been shown that such a strategy for energy trading would help the CSs to balance their load requirements as well as provide profit to the EV owners. The results prove that SDN improves the communication in terms of delay, throughput and network utilization over the conventional networks; while EVs can be successfully utilized to manage the load requirements of various CSs to gain a significant amount of profit.

Gagangeet is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Durham University and Fellow of Durham Energy Institute. Before this, I worked as a post-doctoral research associate at Newcastle University, a research associate at Thapar University (India), a visiting researcher at University of Klagenfurt (Austria) and on various academic positions for more than a decade. For my contributions to the area of scalable and sustainable computing, I was awarded the 2018 IEEE TCSC Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award and also 2022 IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence (Early Career Researcher). I also received 2021 IEEE Systems Journal Best Paper Award. I serve as a lead Organising Chair for workshop series (BlockCPS, SecSDN and BlockSecSDN) held annually in conjunction with different conferences like IEEE Infocom, IEEE Globecom, IEEE ICC, ACM/IEEE UCC and many more. I am serving as an Area Editor for Ad hoc Networks (Elsevier), an Associate Editor for IET Smart Grid, and Associate Editor for Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience (Wiley). 

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