Blockchain-based Data Management in Vehicular Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are projected to be an integral component in intelligent transportation systems, poised to support road safety services via the Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Roadside (V2R) units communication. With the evolution of technology and the growth in the number of smart vehicles, traditional VANETs face technical challenges in deployment and management due to less scalability and poor connectivity. Current smart vehicles are identified, authenticated, and connected through central cloud servers. This model will have limited scalability as the technology becomes pervasive, and the cloud servers will remain a single point of failure that can disrupt the entire network. Therefore, we need a secure distributed system to reduce the network traffic rate. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based distributed message exchange system that will handle the exchange of safety and periodic beacon messages among vehicles. Since blockchain is characterized as being a decentralized and non-tampering system. We considered saving the safety messages only in the blockchain as they occur less than the periodic messages and they are more important. We propose to implement the blockchain per country to reduce the number of nodes/vehicles joining the network. We also reduce the block body size by using the Kademlia Distributed Hash Table (DHT) to broadcast the beacon messages. Experimental evaluation shows that the system can protect a V2V network against different attack types, such as sybil attack and alteration attack with TPR more than 95%. The experiments also show that the block body size is reduced by a factor of 1:5, which helps in broadcasting the data faster.