A Cross-Layer Trust-Based Consensus Protocol for Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading Using Fuzzy Logic

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) energy trading platforms are being actively designed, tested, and operated by engineers, power distribution companies, and prosumers. The assurance of the accountability of the conduct of different stakeholders through a robust trust management mechanism is imperative in such platforms. The usage of blockchain, as an underlying technology, can ensure numerous properties, such as immutability, transparency, and traceable execution of transactions, in addition to ensuring trust establishment among different entities of the system. Few blockchain-based decentralized energy trading platforms have been designed in the literature to build trust about the platform and among prosumers. However, none of these proposals have considered human-in-the-loop in the trust establishment process. Moreover, these solutions have considered trust only at a particular layer of the blockchain, such as at the application or consensus layer. To bridge this gap, this article presents a novel cross-layer trust-based consensus protocol that considers human-in-the-loop and employs fuzzy logic to address the issue of vagueness of trust values by offering human interpretable trust level. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed protocol in comparison to established consensus mechanisms. The analysis also shows the protocol is immune against selfish mining, 51% and Sybil attacks.