A V2V charging allocation protocol for electric vehicles in VANET

This paper tackles the problem of the propagation of charging information in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) and the decentralized allocation of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) charging pairs. Electric Vehicles (EVs) have gained the attention of various sectors as a green alternative to the air-polluting fuel-based vehicles. However, due to the limitation of the EVs' battery capacity and the shortage in the number of charging stations causing significant waiting time to charge, V2V charging has emerged as a promising solution to help address these issues. Mainly, V2V solutions need to define two mechanisms: an information dissemination mechanism and a charging pairs allocation mechanism. In the literature, two architectures are proposed: centralized and semi-distributed using VANET. However, in addition to suffering from the single point of failure problem, centralized solutions consider only connected vehicles during the charging pair allocation. On the other hand, existing VANET based solutions address the problem of charging information dissemination while still performing the allocation of V2V charging pairs in a centralized way. In this paper, we propose an ad-hoc-based solution for V2V charging where both information dissemination and charging pairs allocation are performed over VANET. To do so, at the application layer of VANET, a decentralized protocol for V2V is proposed. This protocol is divided into two phases: providers announcement where consumers in the network can discover the nearby providers, and provider-consumer allocation where providers select the appropriate consumer based on the received OFFERs. At the network layer, Quality of Service-Optimized Link State Routing (QoS-OLSR) is used to find routing paths using the Multi-Point Relays (MPRs). These MPRs are in fact utilized by the protocol to propagate the announcement of the providers to the network. The simulation results show high performance of the proposed protocol in terms of packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay. In addition, in terms of payoff and allocation rate, the proposed protocol performs better than centralized allocation in the presence of disconnected EVs. (C) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.