Dual‐blockchain‐based P2P energy trading system with an improved optimistic rollup mechanism

Abstract

Blockchain technology has been recognised as a promising technology for supporting Peer‐to‐Peer (P2P) energy trading—an emerging paradigm in which energy trading is performed directly between end energy customers. The state‐of‐the‐art blockchain designs for P2P energy trading can only support less compute‐intensive energy trading tasks and/or rely on the set up of a long challenge time to ensure correctness of transactions, which restricts the systems' scalability and applicability in the diverse P2P energy trading applications. This paper proposes a new dual‐blockchain system for P2P energy trading. The system consists of a primary blockchain and a secondary blockchain. The primary blockchain is mainly responsible for storing the data of P2P energy trading transactions while the compute‐intensive tasks (e.g. pricing and transaction verification) are executed in the secondary blockchain. An Improved Optimistic Rollup (IOR) mechanism is proposed to facilitate the co‐operation of the dual blockchains. Through a specific ‘executor‐validator’ mechanism and a group of specific smart contracts with different functions, the IOR mechanism can effectively accommodate the dual blockchains to execute the P2P energy trading transactions in a computational efficient manner while ensuring the correctness and security of the transactions. A prototype of the proposed system is implemented on Fisco Bcos and Alibaba Cloud and comprehensive simulations are conducted to validate the proposed system.

Day‐ahead continuous double auction‐based peer‐to‐peer energy trading platform incorporating trading losses and network utilisation fee

“…A dual blockchain implementation for a P2P trading platform was developed in Ref. [32] that consists of a primary blockchain for storing the P2P data and a secondary blockchain to perform the computationally expensive tasks, such as the pricing mechanisms and transaction execution.…”

Blockchain, Data Protection and P2P Energy Trading: A Review on Legal and Economic Challenges

“…Indeed, scalability, interoperability, system performance and calculation time are still the main topics debated by both professionals and academics to ensure the correctness of transactions [14]. Yu et al [15] have recently developed a new dual-BCT system for P2P energy trading to reduce timeconsuming calculations because smart contracts are mainly created for simple calculations and cannot address large interactive computation deriving from complex energy price schemes [102]. The first BCT stores the data of P2P transactions while the second BCT performs the compute-intensive tasks in order to execute P2P energy transactions in a computational efficient manner.…”

“…Within this framework, blockchain technology (BCT) has recently gained increasing attention from both academics and professionals [14], leading to several real-world implementations in the energy industry [15]. Indeed, BCT permits the automated execution of smart contracts in peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading [16], which is based on the collection, storage and processing of a large amount of user data [17].…”