An Efficient, Secured, and Infinitely Scalable Consensus Mechanism for Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading Blockchain

Abstract

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) energy trading has the potential to create a more efficient and sustainable electricity market. It can relieve the load on the power grid during peak usage periods. However, such a P2P energy market is decentralized and vulnerable to numerous cyber attacks. Decentralized blockchain technology has been proposed to solve these problems. The consensus mechanism is the core of blockchain. It determines the effectiveness and safety of blockchain for energy trading. However, consensus mechanisms applied to energy trading today are traditional consensus. Due to their high latency and significant computational power, they cannot be directly implemented in P2P energy trading. Therefore, we propose a novel Block Alliance Consensus (BAC) mechanism. The BAC breaks through the blockchain impossible triangle in the energy trading scenario by reasonably pursuing decentralization. We achieve infinite scalability via sharding. Within each shard, we substitute the Hashgraph for conventional methods to further improve the throughput and transaction speed. We design a cross-shard method for transactions between different shards. We implement the energy trading blockchain (ETB) and BAC consensus mechanism on the Hyperledger Fabric platform. The experiments show that our ETB is not limited to the impossibility triangle like other consensus. Our BAC mechanism achieves infinite scalability while ensuring high levels of security.