Toward Scalable Blockchain for Data Management in VANETs

Abstract

Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) are developing at a rapid pace due to the recent breakthroughs in digital fields such as sensor technology and the internet of things. The main technical challenges of current VANETs can be reduced to a lack of decentralization, data integrity, and privacy protection. Since the blockchain is decentralized and designed to be immutable, this paper proposes a novel architecture for secure data management in VANETs using blockchain. Our approach is based on a consortium blockchain, and adaptations have been made to deal with the VANETs context. We also exploit the notions of micro blocks and transactions to reduce the amount of exchanged messages. The performance of the proposed approach in terms of scalability, security, and resource consumption is assessed through simulations. Results have indicated that our approach succeeds in addressing the above VANETs challenges, and its performance is good enough to be used in real-world contexts.