A Scalable Blockchain-based Smart Contract Model for Decentralized Voltage Stability Using Sharding Technique

TL;DR

This paper explores using blockchain smart contracts and sharding to enhance the scalability and performance of decentralized voltage stability control in smart grids, demonstrating significant improvements through a prototype implementation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel blockchain-based model with sharding for real-time voltage stability management in smart grids, validated via a prototype system.

Findings

Sharding improves transaction success rates.

Sharding reduces transaction latency.

Blockchain-based control is feasible for real-time grid management.

Abstract

Blockchain technologies are one possible avenue for increasing the resilience of the Smart Grid, by decentralizing the monitoring and control of system-level objectives such as voltage stability protection. They furthermore offer benefits in data immutability and traceability, as blockchains are cryptographically secured. However, the performance of blockchain-based systems in real-time grid monitoring and control has never been empirically tested. This study proposes implementing a decentralized voltage stability algorithm using blockchain-based smart contracts, as a testbed for evaluating the performance of blockchains in real-time control. We furthermore investigate sharding mechanisms as a means of improving the system's scalability with fixed computing resources. We implement our models as a proof-of-concept prototype system using Hyperledger Fabric as our blockchain platform, the Matpower library in MATLAB as our power system simulator, and Hyperledger Caliper as our performance evaluation tool. We found that sharding does indeed lead to a substantial improvement in system scalability for this domain, measured by both transaction success rates and transaction latency.