Title: A practical solution for blockchain-secured sharing of trustworthy traffic information in vehicular ad hoc networks

Authors: Zhaowei Ma; Li Zhu; Xiantao Jiang; F. Richard Yu; Omair Shafiq; Jeremy James

Addresses: School of Information Technology, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada ' State Key Laboratory of Rail Traffic Control, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China ' Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, 201308, China ' School of Information Technology, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada ' School of Information Technology, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada ' Four DRobotics Corporation, Ottawa, ON K2H-5Z2, Canada

Abstract: The extensive use of vehicles nowadays and the emergency of autonomous driving urge the improvement of traffic safety. Prevalent approaches competent at preventing road accidents are inseparable from the trustworthy data acquisition. But in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), data transmission and storage are unreliable due to constrained resource and unsteady topology. Currently, distribution is widely applied into VANETs for multifold data protection and blockchain becomes preferred with its distributed consensus and ledger for data trust protection. Therefore, we propose a system in this paper, which employs blockchain technology to secure the sharing of visual traffic information. As proposed, the sequence of frames is used for their integrity consensus, the transaction capacity is adjusted according to the frame types, and transcoding frames is defined via smart contracts; thus, traffic information gains more in-depth protection. With the proposed system, vehicles can confidently use the information for safety guidance.

Keywords: vehicular ad hoc network; VANET; distributed ledger technology; blockchain; smart contract; consensus.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2022.122982

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2022 Vol.39 No.1, pp.18 - 33

Received: 05 Jul 2021
Accepted: 18 Jul 2021

Published online: 19 May 2022 *

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