An Architecture and Performance Evaluation of Blockchain-Based Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading

Several recent studies have suggested Blockchain for Peer-to-Peer energy trading (P2P-ET) to achieve better security, privacy and fast payment settlement. Most of them however rely on either public Blockchains (which have low performance) or permissioned blockchains (which have low decentralization level and do not provide byzantine fault tolerance). Moreover, these solutions have limitations when capturing the business model of existing energy trading systems. This article proposes a Unified permissioned blockchain-based P2P-ET Architecture (UBETA) that integrates three different types of energy markets and provides a unified energy trading and payment settlement model. The UBETA system is based on an enterprise Ethereum Blockchain, known as Hyperledger Besu, and Istanbul Byzantine Fault Tolerance (IBFT) consensus algorithm. We compared the performance of the proposed IBFT-based system with three existing systems (i.e., Ethereum Clique, Ethereum Proof of Work and Hyperledger Fabric's Raft) using specific performance metrics (i.e., read/write transaction latency, read/write transaction throughput and fail rate). The experiments were carried out on a network size of up to 60 nodes and a real energy trading data set from the Western Australian energy market was used. The experiment results indicate that the IBFT-based system has 15x lower latency and nearly 2x throughput compared to existing Proof of Work based P2P-ET solutions. Moreover, the system provides better scalability and success rate than existing Raft based P2P-ET systems: the fail rate of the IBFT-based system only increased by 11% while that of Raft increased by 20% when increasing the number of nodes from 20 to 60. In addition, the proposed unified energy trading model provides lower latency and reduces the number of blockchain transactions compared to the non-unified counterpart.