Towards Requester-Provider Bilateral Utility Maximization and Collision Resistance in Blockchain-Based Microgrid Energy Trading

Abstract

Microgrid is a promising system for coordinating distributed energy in the future Energy Internet, where energy market is crucial for facilitating multi-directional trading. Nevertheless, the traditional solutions for energy trading usually rely on a centralized framework, which is vulnerable to high operation cost and low transparency. To address the problem, the blockchain strategy has been widely deployed in microgrid energy trading. However, existing blockchain-based systems have not formally considered: (i) collusion attacks launched by a pair of dishonest consumer and microgrid; (ii) and the demands of maximizing bilateral utility. Therefore, in this work, we propose a blockchain-based microgrid energy trading system that allows a consumer to dynamically change its service quality quotes for a microgrid. In particular, bilateral utility of requester-provider is almost maximized, with employing a Bayesian Nash equilibrium strategy to model the interaction between consumers and microgrids. Moreover, collusion attacks during the bidding process are certainly prevented from a dishonest pair of consumer and microgrid. To achieve this, we employ a request-based comparable encryption technique to compare two microgrids’ revenues in a privacy-preserving way, in which each microgrid should submit an encrypted expected revenue. In addition, a general security analysis of our system is formally discussed. To illustrate the effectiveness, we take a blockchain-based framework to build the experiment platform, where the structure of nodes and transaction process are well formalized.