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.