Towards Distributed Battery Switch Based Electro-Mobility Using Publish/Subscribe System

With the growing popularization of Electric Vehicle (EVs), Electro-mobility (in terms of where to charge EV) has become an increasingly important research problem in smart cities. One of the major concerns is the anxiety of EVs, as drivers may suffer from discomfort due to long charging time. In this article, we leverage the battery switch technology to provide an even faster charging than plug-in charging service, by cycling switchable (fully-recharged) batteries at Charging Stations (CSs). Upon that, a cost-efficient Publish/Subscribe (P/S) system is provisioned, to facilitate the design of distributed charging manner for privacy guarantee. The proposed communication framework utilizes Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)-functioned Road Side Units (RSUs) to bridge, process and aggregate the information flow between CSs and EVs. We further design an advanced reservation based charging system, in which the knowledge of EVs’ reservations is utilized to predict how likely a CS will be congested. This benefits to a smart transportation planning on where to charge, in order to improve charging comfort. Results show the advantage of our enabling technology comparing to other benchmark solutions, in terms of minimized waiting time for the battery switch (as the benefit for EV drivers), and a higher number of batteries switched (as the benefit for CSs).