The Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) has become essential for the economical and technological development of a country. The maturity of communication technologies (Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V)) and the amalgamation of smart grids, electric vehicles (EVs) and energy trading resulted in a storm of research opportunities for green ITS. In addition, the combination of vehicular communication technologies and ITS enable efficient selection of EV charging stations (CS) and scheduling EVs charging requirements in real-time. However, the untrusted centralized nature of energy markets and EV charging infrastructures result in several privacy and security threats to EV user's private information. These security and privacy threats include targeted advertisements, privacy leakage, selling data to third party, etc. In this work, we propose BlockEV, a blockchain-based efficient CS selection protocol for EVs to ensure the security and privacy of the EV users, availability of the reserved time slots at CSs, high Quality of Service (QoS) and enhanced EV user comfort. First, a blockchain-based framework is introduced to implement secure charging services and trusted reservation for EVs with the execution of smart contract. Second, we focus on the efficient CS selection and propose a mechanism for EVs to select the CS locally without sharing private information to CS, while fulfilling their service requirements. Evaluations show that the proposed BlockEV is scalable with significantly low blockchain transaction and storage overhead.

Blockchains are currently gaining attention as a newly emerging technology in both academia and industry, capable of impacting a variety of domains beyond cryptocurrencies. Performance modeling can be used to provide us with a deeper understanding of the behavior and dynamics within blockchain peer-to-peer networks. Blockchain system architects can leverage network models to properly tune their system and to reduce design costs significantly. In this article, we focus on the original and well-established Bitcoin blockchain network. In particular, we propose a random graph model for performance modeling and analysis of the inventory-based protocol for block dissemination. This model addresses the impact of key blockchain parameters on the overall performance of Bitcoin. We derive some explicit and closed-form equations for block propagation delay and traffic overhead in the Bitcoin network. We also adapt our model to study the impact of deploying a relay network and investigate the effect of the relay network size on the network performance and decentralization. We implement our model using the popular network simulator OMNet++. We validate the accuracy of our theoretical model and its implementation with our dataset mined from the Bitcoin network. Our results show the tradeoff between the default number of connections per node, network bandwidth, and block size in order to compute the optimal block propagation delay over the network. Additionally, we found that bigger relay networks can jeopardize the decentralization of the Bitcoin network.

Undoubtedly, the supply chain management (SCM) system is an important part of many organizations worldwide; over time, the technologies used to manage a supply chain ecosystem have, therefore, a great impact on businesses’ effectiveness. Among others, numerous developments have been made that targeted to have robust supply chain systems to efficiently manage the growing demands of various supplies, considering the underlying requirements and main challenges such as scalability, specifically privacy and security, of various business networks. Internet of things (IoT) comes with a solution to manage a complex, scalable supply chain system, but to provide and attain enough security during information exchange, along with keeping the privacy of its users, is the great inherent challenge of IoT. To fulfill these limitations, this study designs and models a scaled IoT-based supply chain (IoT-SC) system, comprising several operations and participants, and deploys mechanisms to leverage the security, mainly confidentially, integrity, authentication (CIA), and a digital signature scheme to leverage potentially secured non-repudiation security service for the worst-case scenario, and to leverage privacy to keep users sensitive personal and location information protected against adversarial entities to the IoT-SC system. Indeed, a scaled IoT-SC system certainly opens new challenges to manage privacy and security while communicating. Therefore, in the IoT-SC system, each transaction writes from edge computing nodes to the IoT-SC controller is thoroughly examined to ensure the proposed solutions in bi-directional communication, and their robustness against adversarial behaviors. Future research works, employing blockchain and its integrations, are detailed as paces to accelerate the privacy and security of the IoT-SC system, for example, migrating IoT-centric computing to an immutable, decentralized platform.

The increased charging demand resulting from the rapid development of electric vehicles (EVs) poses various challenges to the stable operation of the distribution network and smart grid. Due to the stochastic EV charging behaviour, the high charging demand at the charging stations (CSs) elevates the load curve which may lead to a spatially imbalanced load demand. As such, forecasting the highly stochastic EV charging load considering an individual EV's unique charging behaviour can result in maintaining the safe operation of the grid and distribution network. Therefore, in this work, we propose Block-FeDL, a blockchain-based Federated Learning (FL) approach for EV charging load forecasting considering the private and sensitive charging information of each EV user. Thereafter, we use a Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (BiLSTM) model within the FeDL for predicting the EV charging load patterns at each client. Moreover, instead of using a centralized server for global model aggregation, we use blockchain technology, where the model aggregation is performed in a decentralized manner and the local model parameters shared by the FL clients can be validated and securely recorded. Lastly, the results show that the Block-FeDL outperform the second-best baseline method by 95%, 96% and 77% in terms of mean square error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and root mean square error (RMSE) for forecasting the EV charging load.

With the advent of modern technologies, including the IoT and blockchain, smart-parking (SP) systems are becoming smarter and smarter. Similar to other automated systems, and particularly those that require automation or minimal interaction with humans, the SP system is heuristic in delivering performances, such as throughput in terms of latency, efficiency, privacy, and security, and it is considered a long-term cost-effective solution. This study looks ahead to future trends and developments in SP systems and presents an inclusive, long-term, effective, and well-performing smart autonomous vehicle parking (SAVP) system that explores and employs the emerging fog-computing and blockchain technologies as robust solutions to strengthen the existing collaborative IoT–cloud platform to build and manage SP systems for autonomous vehicles (AVs). In other words, the proposed SAVP system offers a smart-parking solution, both indoors and outdoors, and mainly for AVs looking for vacant parking, wherein the fog nodes act as a middleware layer that provides various parking operations closer to IoT-enabled edge devices. To address the challenges of privacy and security, a lightweight integrated blockchain and cryptography (LIBC) module is deployed, which is functional at each fog node, to authorize and grant access to the AVs in every phase of parking (e.g., from the parking entrance to the parking slot to the parking exit). A proof-of-concept implementation was conducted, wherein the overall computed results, such as the average response time, efficiency, privacy, and security, were examined as highly efficient to enable a proven SAVP system. This study also examined an innovative pace, with careful considerations to combatting the existing SP-system challenges and, therefore, to building and managing future scalable SP systems.

Climate change is a major issue that has disastrous impacts on the environment through different causes like the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission. Many energy utilities around the world intend to reduce GHG emissions by promoting different systems including carbon emission trading (CET), renewable energy certificates (RECs), and tradable white certificates (TWCs). However, these systems are centralized, highly regulated, and operationally expensive and do not meet transparency, trust and security requirements. Accordingly, GHG emission reduction schemes are gradually moving towards blockchain-based solutions due to their underpinning characteristics including decentralization, transparency, anonymity, and trust (independent from third parties). This paper performs a comprehensive investigation into the blockchain technology, deployed for GHG emission reduction plans. It explores existing blockchain solutions along with their associated challenges to effectively uncover their potentials. As a result, this study suggests possible lines of research for future enhancements of blockchain systems particularly their incorporation in GHG emission reduction.