SaFaR: Solana Blockchain-based Optimal Route Selection Scheme for Cab Aggregators

In modern smart communities,decentralized ridesharing (RS) via cab aggregator (CA) services allow users to share trips at reduced expenses, and also help in mitigating congestion. The cab user (CU), and cab driver (CD) share sensitive information (credentials, account linkages, and location information) via open channels over CAs distributed server. During trips, in some cases, CDs do not follow an optimal path from source to destination, which leads to increased payments. Thus, inconsistencies occur due to a lack of transparency between CU, CDs, and CAs. Motivated from the same, we propose a scheme, SaFaR, that integrates consortium Solana blockchain (SBC) to assure transparency and transactional scalability between entities. CU and CD information is maintained in offline interplanetary file systems (IPFS) ledgers during the registration process, and the meta-information is stored in SBC. An optimal dynamic route algorithm is proposed based on retrospective priority queue in Dijkstra algorithm (RPQDA) is proposed on GPS-trace points obtained from path setup, that is modelled as a graph. The optimal route is stored on IPFS, so route alterations are not possible. Simulation analysis results have shown that an improvement of 99% storage cost is obtained due to IPFS, and an average improvement of 14.89% is obtained in travelling cost over dynamic and static-route setups.