Blockchain-based secured event-information sharing protocol in internet of vehicles for smart cities

An intelligent transportation system is an advanced application that aims to provide traffic congestion information, road accidents, emergency information to other vehicles, etc. In the traditional transportation systems, the road-side unit (RSU) acts as a central authority and plays an important role to maintain everything in the networks. To solve single point of failure, as well as to achieve data immutability, blockchain-based decentralized vehicular ad-hoc networks is very essential and important. In order to share critical information among all the road-side units, we design a blockchain-based decentralized vehicular ad-hoc network that supports data immutability property. We have also designed an authentication protocol for the vehicle's user and a consensus mechanism to validate transactions. Besides, a smart contract mechanism has also been proposed. Informal security analysis confirms anonymity property with other security requirements. We have also calculated and discussed communication, computation, and storage overhead of the proposed scheme. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.