Review of Communication Technologies for Electric Vehicle Charging Management and Coordination

Recently, electric vehicles (EVs) have been introduced as an alternative method of transportation to help mitigate environmental issues, such as carbon emissions and fuel consumption, caused by conventional transportation systems. The implementation of effective EV charging systems is essential to motivate mass adoption of EVs. Accordingly, fast and reliable communications between the charging systems and the EVs are vital for efficient management of the charging process. Different radio access technologies (RATs) are discussed in the literature to enable communication between the highly mobile EVs and the charging subsystems, to collect and exchange information such as state of charge (SoC), users' locations, and charging decisions between the different network entities. This information can be used to coordinate charging plans and select the optimal routes for moving vehicles. This paper presents a survey of existing literature on vehicular communications for EV charging coordination and management. The communication requirements and feasible communication technologies for vehicular communication are first discussed in details. A review of the physical layer security strategies is then presented and the role of the different RATs in EV charging coordination and management is described and studied.