Block-FeST: Blockchain-Enhanced Federated Sparse Transformers for Privacy-Preserving RES Forecasting in Internet of Vehicles Systems

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) frameworks integrate smart vehicles, roads, network infrastructures, and users into one system, enhancing environmental awareness, increasing efficiency, and reducing accidents. Although IoV is widely adopted, it has resulted in an increase in global energy demand, necessitating more robust and reliable energy solutions. In order to meet this growing demand, both traditional and distributed energy generation technologies have been developed, particularly renewable energy sources (RES). In order to ensure seamless operation of smart vehicles and related infrastructure, integrating renewable energy into existing grid infrastructure is essential. This enables stable and efficient power supply to IoV systems, especially during time periods of high demand. As part of this shift, it is important to accurately forecast the energy generation load of individual prosumers—entities that both produce and consume energy—because of their intermittent and dynamic nature. Therefore, we propose Block-FeST, a blockchain-based Federated Learning (FL) framework designed to predict the energy generation patterns of RES prosumers while preserving their private and sensitive data. Within this Block-FeST framework, a Sparse Transformer model is used to forecast energy generation among prosumer clients. Additionally, blockchain technology is integrated into the Block-FeST framework to enable distributed aggregation and securely validate and record the local parameters shared by clients. The results indicate that Block-FeST is superior to the second-best baseline method, with improvements of 20.4% in the mean square error (MSE), 13.7% in mean absolute error (MAE) and 19.3% in root mean square error (RMSE) for a long sequence length of 128.