A Scalable Blockchain-based High-Definition Map Update Management System

Abstract

High-Definition (HD) map service requires more frequent update and much larger data volume than traditional map services, so that it is very difficult to handle HD map update by existing offline data collection such as survey fleets, and centralized cloud-based map services. To solve this problem, vehicle crowd-sourcing and edge computing infrastructure are proposed to timely capture the change of the physical world and distributedly process the huge amount of raw data close to the vehicles. In such a decentralized environment, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), such as blockchain, is very promising to meet some of the important requirements of data integrity and traceability of map update, but it is challenging to meet the requirement of frequent map update and scale to a large-scale system. In this work, we propose a salable HD map update management system by leveraging multiple blockchain networks in parallel and dynamically assign the generated map update to the corresponding blockchains according to the location and update frequency requirements. To verify the proposed system, we prototyped it based on the Hyperledger Fabric, an open-source implementation of consortium blockchain, and tested it in the lab environment.