Efficient Authentication Mechanism for PEV Charging Infrastructure

Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) will not only have a substantial influence on the emerging smart grid system but also create numerous challenges for the utility and customer to deal with their connections and charging. Authentication and authorization processes are critical elements to enable mass deployment of charging stations and to provide authorized customers to access the charging facility. Works on authentication system for PEV charging infrastructure are limited, and are mainly based on centralized architectures. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive decentralized authentication mechanism for PEV charging infrastructure in order to overcome shortcomings of the centralized authentication system and to provide robust authentication in multi-server environment. We present system analysis including analysis of security and functional requirements. Compared to the prevailing centralized scheme, the proposed system reduces authentication latency and is more efficient and robust.