Energy and Profit-Aware Proof-of-Stake Offloading in Blockchain-based VANETs

In Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANET) users do not necessarily trust each other and in some cases they may introduce dubios information in the network. Centralized approaches to improve the credibility of information do not easily scale, require trusting the service provider and have higher network delay. Blockchain solutions are promising in the area but they need consensus on the credibility of new information, which requires the participants solve computational puzzles in a competitive manner. To cope with vehicles' limited computational resources and mobility, we propose brokerage mechanism to decide whether to execute the validation locally, or to offload it to an edge or cloud infrastructure. We define a Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) method to enable participants to decide whether to take part in the validation and whether to offload it considering the state of the infrastructure, energy efficiency, the offloading cost and the computation reward. Our method obtains 77.7% higher profit and consumes 39.2% less energy in comparison with the case where no offloading is allowed.