Trustworthy Traffic Information Sharing Secured via Blockchain in VANETs

Abstract

The extensive use of vehicles, especially with the emergency of autonomous driving, urges the improvement of traffic safety. Prevalent approaches, such as Global Positioning System (GPS), Internet of Things (IoT) system and Artificial Intelligence (AI), have demonstrated their strength in preventing road accidents, with the support of trustworthy data. However, in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), data transmission and storage are unreliable due to various constraints such as limited physical resource and unsteady topology. Distributed schemes are widely applied in VANETs to enforce multifold protection on vehicular data. In particular, Blockchain has become a promising approach, as it implements the real-sense distributed solution with consensus algorithm and distributed ledger. To this end, we propose a novel system in this paper, which employs Blockchain technology to consolidate the traffic information sharing in VANETs and holds profound significance for intelligent applications. Our system focuses on sharing real-time visual traffic information at the frame level via Blockchain in VANETs. Integrity verification of frames based on their sequences and timestamps is imposed prior to the consensus in Blockchain, coupled with digital watermarking to protect the multimedia traffic data. Improved efficiency and reliability of sharing are achieved by the system dynamically adjusting transaction volume in terms of the frame type and number. With the fault tolerance and immutability of Blockchain, our proposal can solidly protect the traffic information sharing against vandalization in VANETs, and confidently escort the traffic with trustworthy safety guidance.