A Fast and Secured Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading Using Blockchain Consensus

The architecture and functioning of the electricity markets are rapidly evolving in favour of solutions based on real-time data sharing and decentralised, distributed, renewable energy generation. Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy markets allow two individuals to transact with one another without the need of intermediaries, reducing the load on the power grid during peak hours. However, such a P2P energy market is prone to various cyber attacks. Blockchain technology has been proposed to implement P2P energy trading to support this change. One of the most crucial components of blockchain technology in energy trading is the consensus mechanism. It determines the effectiveness and security of the blockchain for energy trading. However, most of the consensus used in energy trading today are traditional consensus such as Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT). These traditional mechanisms cannot be directly adopted in P2P energy trading due to their huge computational power, low throughput, and high latency. Therefore, we propose the Block Alliance Consensus (BAC) mechanism based on Hashgraph. In a massive P2P energy trading network, BAC can keep Hashgraph's throughput while resisting Sybil attacks and supporting the addition and deletion of energy participants. The high efficiency and security of BAC and the blockchain-based energy trading platform are verified through experiments: our improved BAC has an average throughput that is 2.56 times more than regular BFT, 5 times greater than PoW, and 30% greater than the original BAC. The improved BAC has an average latency that is 41% less than BAC and 81% less than original BFT. Our energy trading blockchain (ETB)'s READ performance can achieve the most outstanding throughput of 1192 tps at a workload of 1200 tps, while WRITE can achieve 682 tps at a workload of 800 tps with a success rate of 95% and 0.18 seconds of latency.