Blockchain-Guided Dynamic Best-Relay Selection for Trustworthy Vehicular Communication

Considering the highly dynamic nature of the vehicular environment and the delay-sensitive wireless medium, enabling secure and reliable vehicle-to-vehicle communication becomes a very challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel system design that uses blockchain technology to establish a high-level trust-management successful trustworthy cooperative vehicular wireless communication. The proposed system is a cross-layer approach that optimizes the best-relay selection process allowing only trustworthy relays to participate in data transmission. In this work, blockchain stores real-time information about relaying, transmitting, and receiving vehicles. The information includes channel characteristics and participation quality. The information is vetted and verified by mining vehicles. The result guides the relay selection process to block untrustworthy vehicles from participation. The entire system is comprehensively modeled and mathematically analyzed. Simulations using throughput and Bit Error Rate (BER) as evaluation metrics demonstrated the effectiveness and efficacy of the presented approach in enabling reliable wireless communication in presence of maliciously behaving vehicles. On average, the overall system throughput rate increased by 3bps, the BER was reduced by almost by 2dBs, and the percentage of false messages decreased by 90% considering high Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR).

Automated summary

This paper presents a system design that utilizes blockchain technology to establish secure and reliable cooperative wireless communication among vehicles. The proposed system verifies real-time information through mining vehicles, guiding the selection of trustworthy relays. Mathematical analysis and simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the system in enabling reliable wireless communication.