Blockchain Empowered Wireless Power Transfer for Green and Secure Internet of Things

Wireless power transfer is a promising approach to charge low-power IoT devices for energy replenishment. However, energy attacks from malicious IoT devices can result in significant energy loss to energy transmitters. In this article, we propose a new distributed and secure wireless power transfer architecture by utilizing blockchain. The proposed architecture includes two planes: the energy plane and blockchain plane. We further abstract three types of traffic flows, transaction flow, consensus flow and coin flow, to provide a profound insight into the workflow of blockchain. Furthermore, to obtain the optimal amount of transferred energy in the energy plane, and to resolve high operational overhead of the consensus process in the blockchain plane, we develop a contract theory based wireless power transfer scheme and a DPoS based lightweight consensus scheme, and design an efficient wireless power transfer mechanism by combining the two schemes. Illustrative results demonstrate that our proposed schemes offer significant energy loss reduction with moderate operational overhead.