DECENTRALIZED PLATFORM FOR AUTONOMOUS ENERGY TRANSACTIONS IN A CONSTRAINED ENVIRONMENT USING BLOCKCHAIN

Techniques are described herein to enable any electric vehicle (or other vehicles capable of transporting and dissipating energy) to broadcast the availability of excess energy using any Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) mechanism. Electric/fuel availability and other information may be propagated by leveraging peer-to-peer decentralized blockchain smart contracts that can be used in a connected electric vehicle environment. DETAILED DESCRIPTION As more and more mobile devices get connected (public or private network), the need for ad-hoc power consumption may continue to increase. For example, a connected battery-powered car XYZ may get low on power after about thirty minutes and be unable to arrive at its destination, thereby requiring on-demand ad-hoc power charging to get to its destination. It is possible that another battery powered car, solar-powered house, etc. (ABC) may have spare power before/around thirty minutes that could be offered to XYZ. If car XYZ agrees to any offers (such as the one from ABC) based on criteria such as proximity (current and future), quality (30mA vs 3000mA), quantity (30W vs 3000W), etc., then car XYZ could obtain the extra power at the right time, right proximity etc. to get to its destination. Additionally, it is quite possible that both parties (taker XYZ and offerer ABC in the aforementioned example) may be mobile as well, and such transactions may therefore occur autonomously without needing to stop and/or connect wires. This example mentions a car, but it could be any device. 2 Gobena et al.: DECENTRALIZED PLATFORM FOR AUTONOMOUS ENERGY TRANSACTIONS IN A CO Published by Technical Disclosure Commons, 2018 2 5684 This necessitates a peer-to-peer decentralized marketplace platform that can allow for interested parties (offerer and taker) to find each other and to conduct transactions in a secured manner. With the introduction of Internet of Things (IoT), smart grid, and smart cities, it is envisioned that the energy distribution and trading between users will reach a new level. As such, techniques described herein allows any electric vehicle (or other vehicles capable of transporting and dissipating energy) to broadcast the availability of excess energy using any Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) mechanism. This mechanism uses the concept of propagating electric/fuel availability and other information by leveraging peer-to-peer decentralized blockchain smart contracts that can be used in a connected electric vehicle environment. As illustrated in Figure 1 below, blockchain may be used to maintain user information and the smart contract that can be used by other parties to ensure and validate the credibility of the party who is advertising the energy availability. The “Producer” is the party willing to provide the energy and the “Consumer” is the party who is receiving the energy.