Maintaining Trust in VANETs using Blockchain

Abstract

Vehicular ad-hoc networks are networks formed by fast moving vehicles which come in contact momentarily and exchange information. Since it's an ad-hoc network, it becomes difficult to maintain trust, security and authenticity of information being exchanged in the network. In this paper, we leverage the concepts of blockchain to maintain trust in the network. Since blockchain provides a tamperproof, decentralized mechanism to store data, we use it to store information related to events such as collision, accident, SOS etc. The information stored on blockchain can be used to validate it at later points of time so as to minimize the false benefit cases by use of Proof of Location certificates. The proposed system has the potential to increase the trust of end users in VANETs. It can also be integrated into the design of future vehicles because of its ease of implementation. The paper also discusses the benefits and constraints of the proposed model along with the related future work.