Amalgamation of blockchain and sixth-generation-envisioned responsive edge orchestration in future cellular vehicle-to-anything ecosystems: Opportunities and challenges

In modern decentralized cellular-vehicle-to-anything (C-V2X) infrastructures, connected autonomous smart vehicles (CASVs) exchange vehicular information with peer CASVs. To leverage responsive communication, sensors deployed in CASVs communicate through responsive edge computing (REC) infrastructures to support device-to-device- (D2D) based communication. To support low-latency, high-bandwidth, dense mobility, and high availability, researchers worldwide have proposed efficient 5G REC infrastructures to end vehicular users (VU). However, with the growing number of sensor units, intelligent automation, dense sensor integration at massive ultra-low latency is required. To address the issue, the focus has shifted toward sixth-generation (6G)-based intelligent C-V2X orchestration. However, the sensor data is exchanged through open channels, and thus trust and privacy among C-V2X nodes is a prime concern. Thus, blockchain (BC) is a potential solution to allow immutable exchange ledgers among CASV sensor units for secure data exchange. With this motivation, the proposed survey integrates BC and 6G-leveraged REC in C-V2X to address the issues of fifth-generation (5G)-REC through immutable, verified, and chronological timestamped data exchanged through 6G-envisioned terahertz (THz) channels, at high mobility, extremely low latency, and high availability. The survey also presents the open issues and research challenges in the 6G-envisioned BC-enabled REC C-V2X ecosystems via a proposed framework. A case study 6Edge is presented for smart 6G intelligent edge integration with BC-based ledgers. Finally, the concluding remarks and future direction of research are proposed. Thus, the proposed survey forms a guideline for automotive stakeholders, academicians, and researchers to explore the various opportunities of the possible integration in more significant detail.

Automated summary

This paper discusses the use of responsive edge computing and blockchain technology in modern C-V2X smart vehicle infrastructures to address security and privacy issues in communication and data exchange. The authors proposed a solution based on 6G and blockchain to support efficient, secure data exchange, while introducing challenges encountered in the research and a proposed framework for addressing them.