IoT-Based Battery Charging and Swapping Stations for Electric Vehicles: A Review of Architectures, Reservation, Security, and Challenges

Abstract

Battery swapping has re-emerged as a practical alternative to plug-in charging for electric vehicles (EVs), particularly for electric two-wheelers used in delivery, ride-hailing, and shared-mobility services, where vehicle downtime directly reduces earnings. As swapping networks grow, a station can no longer be a passive rack of chargers: it must continuously know which batteries are charged, reserved, or faulty, and it must release a battery only to the user entitled to it. This paper reviews battery charging and swapping stations from this Internet of Things (IoT) viewpoint. It (i) compares energy-replenishment models and the commercial and policy landscape; (ii) surveys studies of station operation, planning, and user acceptance; (iii) examines IoT sensing, communication, and cloud architectures for real-time batterystatus monitoring; (iv) analyzes reservation, authentication, and access-control mechanisms and their cybersecurity implications; and (v) discusses charging safety and evaluation metrics. A rulebased battery-state model and a low-cost prototype that combines an ESP32 controller, Li-Po battery bays, RFID/PIN authentication, servo-actuated gates, a Firebase database, and a ReactJS dashboard are presented as an illustrative reference implementation. The reviewed studies largely address operation, planning, or acceptance separately; the review identifies open challenges in integrated real-time monitoring, interoperability, battery-health estimation, security, and standardized evaluation.