ICoord: Efficient charging of the Electric-Vehicles through IoT-assisted coordination with the charging-infrastructure

Abstract

Electric-Vehicles (EVs) will play an increasingly important role as a mode of transportation in the near future. However, due to the rapid increase in the number of EVs, and relatively slow development of the necessary charging infrastructure, practical and effective use of the EVs may get highly limited. Coordination among the Charging-Stations (CSs) and the EVs is one of the essential components for maximizing the use of the limited available charging infrastructure. Currently, any such coordination is handled by centralized cloud-assisted strategies. In light of the rapid increase in the number of EVs and the potential single-point-of-failure related issues in centralized solutions, this paper introduces a decentralized IoT-based framework iCoord for the EV–CS coordination for efficient charge scheduling of the EVs. The framework leverages recent advancements in Synchronous-Transmission (ST)-based communication to facilitate efficient on-the-fly data-sharing among the EVs and CSs. Especially, iCoord utilizes both EV–EV and EV–CS coordination to improve the system’s efficiency. Through extensive simulation based studies we demonstrate that the strategy enables efficient charging of the EVs while maintaining a well-balanced distribution of the load over the CSs which is a significant factor in the overall performance of an EV-based transportation system.