Abdullah Lakhan, Mazin Abed Mohammed, Karrar Hameed Abdulkareem, Muhammet Deveci · 7 authors
The Intelligent Transport System (ITS) is an emerging paradigm that offers numerous services at the infrastructure level for vehicle applications. Vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) is an advanced form of ITS where diverse vehicle services are deployed on the roadside unit. V2I consists of distributed computing nodes where transport applications are parallel processed. Many research challenges exist in the presented V2I paradigms regarding security, cyber-attacks, and application processing among heterogeneous nodes. These cyber-attacks, Sybil attacks, and their attempts cause a lack of security and degrade the V2I performance in the presented paradigms. This paper presents a new secure blockchain framework that handles cyber-attacks, as mentioned earlier. This paper formulates this complex problem as a combinatorial problem, encompassing concave and convex problems. The convex function minimizes the given constraints, such as time and security risk, and the concave function improves performance and accuracy. Therefore, numerous constraints, such as time, energy, malware detection accuracy, and application deadlines, require optimization for the considered problem. Combining the jointly non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) and long short-term memory (LSTM) schemes is the best way to meet the problem’s limitations. In this study, the paper designed a malware dataset with known and unknown malware. The different kinds of malware lists (e.g., cyber-attacks) are considered in the form of known and unknown malware lists with the characteristics, size of code, where malware comes from, attack on which data, and current status of the workload after being attacked by the malware. Our main idea is to present blockchain, NSGA-II, and LSTM schemes that handle phishing, routing, Sybil, and 51% of cyber-attacks without compromising application performance. Simulation results show that the study reduces delay and energy, improves accuracy, and minimizes security risks for vehicular applications.
Priyanka Gaba, Ram Shringar Raw, Omprakash Kaiwartya, Mohammad Aljaidi
Vehicles are no longer stand-alone mechanical entities due to the advancements in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication-centric Internet of Connected Vehicles (IoV) frameworks. However, the advancement in connected vehicles leads to another serious security threat, online vehicle hijacking, where the steering control of vehicles can be hacked online. The feasibility of traditional security solutions in IoV environments is very limited, considering the intermittent network connectivity to cloud servers and vehicle-centric computing capability constraints. In this context, this paper presents a Blockchain-enabled Security Architecture for a connected vehicular Fog networking Environment (B-SAFE). Firstly, blockchain security and vehicular fog networking are introduced as preliminaries of the framework. Secondly, a three-layer architecture of B-SAFE is presented, focusing on vehicular communication, blockchain at fog nodes, and the cloud as trust and reward management for vehicles. Thirdly, details of the blockchain implementation at fog nodes is presented, along with a flowchart and algorithm. The performance of the evaluation of the proposed framework B-SAFE attests to the benefits in terms of trust, reward points, and threshold calculation.
Sana Hafeez, Mahmoud A. Shawky, Mohammad Al-Quraan, Lina Mohjazi · 6 authors
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), an emerging architecture that embodies flying ad-hoc networks, face critical privacy and security challenges, mainly when engaged in data-sensitive missions. Therefore, message authentication is a crucial security feature in drone communications. This paper presents a Blockchain-based Efficient, and Trusted Authentication scheme for UAV communication, BETA-UAV, which exploits the inherent properties of blockchain technology concerning memorability and is immutable to record communication sessions via transactions using a smart contract. The smart contract in BETA-UAV allows participants to publish and call transactions from the blockchain network. Furthermore, transaction addresses are proof of freshness and trustworthiness for subsequent transmissions. Furthermore, we investigated their ability to resist active attacks, such as impersonation, replaying, and modification. In addition, we evaluate the gas costs associated with the functions of the smart contract by implementing a BETA-UAV on the Ethereum public blockchain. A comparison of the computation and communication overheads shows that the proposed approach can save significant costs over traditional techniques.
To ensure the aggregation of a high-quality global model during the data-sharing process in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), current approaches primarily utilize gradient detection to mitigate malicious or low-quality parameter updates. However, deploying gradient detection in plain text neglects adequate privacy protection for vehicular data. This paper proposes the IoV-BDSS, a novel data-sharing scheme that integrates blockchain and hybrid privacy technologies to protect private data in gradient detection. This paper utilizes Euclidean distance to filter the similarity between vehicles and gradients, followed by encrypting the filtered gradients using secret sharing. Moreover, this paper evaluates the contribution and credibility of participating nodes, further ensuring the secure storage of high-quality models on the blockchain. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves data sharing while preserving privacy and accuracy. It also exhibits resilience against 30% poisoning attacks, with a test error rate remaining below 0.16. Furthermore, our scheme incurs a lower computational overhead and faster inference speed, markedly reducing experimental costs by approximately 26% compared to similar methods, rendering it suitable for highly dynamic IoV systems with unstable communication.
With the development of Electric Vehicles (EVs), Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) electricity transactions have gained popularity. Among them, EV users can easily obtain information such as their own location and speed through the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), and communicate with other entities through the IoV, but the leak of the electricity transaction plan and private information such as identity, location, speed, etc. required for the transaction may put the users in danger and undermine the fairness of the transaction. Aiming at the above problems, A V2V electricity transaction scheme with privacy protection based on the IoV and consortium blockchain is proposed. Firstly, a long-term and short-term pseudo-identity algorithm is designed for users participating in V2V transactions. Users conduct each electricity transaction with different short-term pseudo-identities to prevent the leakage of their identity information; and when fraudulent transactions occur, the real identity of the fraudulent users can be traced based on their long-term pseudo-identities or public key information. Secondly, a certificateless aggregate signcryption algorithm is designed for secure communication in the IoV. Finally, consortium blockchain technology is adopted to solve the problems of single point of failure and data tampering that exist in centralized transactions. At the same time, a reputation value evaluation mechanism based on transaction completion rate and a Proof of Reputation consensus mechanism based on fixed time and fixed block capacity packing method are also designed, which not only reduces the computational power consumption but also motivates the seller EV to conduct V2V electricity transactions in good faith. The theory proves that the scheme is capable of protecting the privacy of EV users effectively. The performance evaluations demonstrate that this scheme has low communication overhead and the computational overhead also has certain advantages.
Abstract The wide applications of the Internet of Drones (IoD), ranging from package delivery to surveillance, attract the attention of industrialists and academicians. Drones are given the task of obtaining sensitive field information within the flying zone in real‐time. Hence, it is important to tackle the privacy and security issues associated with drones that are employed in these kinds of situations. Also, when the drones move to the new unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operator coverage area, the drones are required to execute the authentication process again, which affects the performance of IoD. To overcome the above‐said shortcomings, a physically secure and privacy‐preserving blockchain enabled authentication method is proposed in this paper. The blockchain network permits drones to perform quick re‐authentication by transferring drone authentication codes to the following UAV operators. In the proposed work, the drone does not need to store the secret keys to perform anonymous authentication, and it provides physical security for the drones. When compared to competing techniques, the proposed scheme delivers the needed security features while incurring lower storage, computational, and communication costs.
The paper proposes a traceability framework based on methodological approach for the deployment of IOTA-Based Distributed Ledger in the mining industry, as a first step of certification and labelling of the sustainable material production. The methodology is evaluated in real-world implementation in scope of the DIG_IT project. The implementation provides significant amount of heterogeneous data originating from different processes and sources during the operation in mines, such as vehicles operations, mining and raw material extraction, workers physical parameters, environmental parameters, sensors (field, biometric, assets), market (supply chains, commodity prices), weather data, etc. Most of these datasets, especially the data about the emission, needs integrity and the ability to be audited by the public community, government and the stakeholders. The methodology for establishing the transparency for the mining operations, the requirements, technical architecture, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) assessment, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) infrastructure, as well as end-to-end traceability, are proposed and evaluated with the actual deployment. The approach advocates end to end security for the increased traceability and data integrity based on Distributed Ledger Technology. Namely, W3C Decentralised Identities and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) should be deployed from the data source to the cloud and anchored onto the Blockchain. The approach showed promising results with the regulations compliance made possible, making the data available and advertised publicly for the emission compliance.
Vehicular fog computing (VFC) is a developing concept that utilizes the ideas of fog computing to facilitate immediate communication and cooperative decision-making among vehicles. However, guaranteeing safe authentication in VFC presents notable difficulties as a result of characteristics such as dynamic network topology, extensive mobility, and limitations on resources. This paper introduces D-BlockAuth, an innovative authentication mechanism for 5G-assisted VFC that utilizes a dual blockchain approach. To reach the most vehicles, this link makes use of all the features of the fifth-generation base station (5G-BS). D-BlockAuth employs two blockchains: a permissioned blockchain to handle long-term identities and a consortium blockchain to enable streamlined and effective authentication at the fog layer. The D-BlockAuth concept incorporates advanced cryptographic techniques such as ring signatures and group signatures, which provide improved privacy and anonymity for vehicles within the network. The study provides a comprehensive description of the architecture of D-BlockAuth, examines its security characteristics, and assesses its performance using simulations. The results indicate that D-BlockAuth successfully performs both efficient and safe authentication in VFC, while also maintaining user privacy.
Badiea Abdulkarem Mohammed, Mahmood A. Al-Shareeda, Abeer Abdullah Alsadhan, Zeyad Ghaleb Al-Mekhlafi · 8 authors
The driving experience in fifth-generation (5G)-assisted vehicular fog computing systems has improved thanks to recent advancements in intelligent transportation. However, in the present vehicular system setup, the phenomenon of providing low computation overhead with massive serving capability is crucial. In the existing scenario, the computational complexity rises when an authenticated driver travels from one roadside unit (RSU) area to another RSU region and must undergo re-authentication by the existing RSU. In this paper, an efficient blockchain-based pseudonym authentication scheme to address these issues and avoiding using RSU for 5G-assisted vehicular fog computing. The pseudonym identity generated for each vehicles and fog servers in order to exchange information about the road environment. The proposed scheme avoids re-authentication by the future fog server by utilising bilinear pairing of points on the elliptic curve and utilising blockchain technology without the need for a trusted authority. For fog computing, fog server obtains the verification key to authenticate the messages sent from vehicles for supporting revocation. The security analysis part of this work shows that the proposed scheme is not only satisfy requirements of security and privacy, but also resistance security attacks. Finally, the evaluation of the proposed scheme’s performance shows that it is more efficient than existing schemes with regards to computation cost, verification speed, and energy consumption.
Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANET) is an emerging area of research due to its low cost, high coverage and fast transmission features. In these networks, the flying nodes are connected with ground stations and communicate wirelessly, especially when the networks are congested and complex. Due to mobility, and lack of predefined infrastructure, these networks have suffered from various security and trust issues. The traditional trust and security solutions are designed for ground networks and are not feasible for these networks. This paper proposes a trust and authentication model including Trust Establishment Mechanism for FANET (TEM-FANET) and authentication system by using Block-chain method. The trust is calculated to evaluate the node’s trust status and ensure the existence of the trustworthy nodes by using direct, indirect, and cumulative trust values. Whereas the authentication system is utilizing blockchain technology for nodes authentication and evaluate its feasibility. The proposed model is lightweight and able to monitor the node’s behavior and compute the trusted quality and broadcast the node status with neighbor nodes. The proposed model is also integrated with ground stations for record keeping and decision-making processes. The proposed model is evaluated in simulation with state-of-the-art trust solutions where the results show the better performance in terms of overhead, data delivery, node detection rate, and computational time.
Dharminder Chaudhary, P. Santhi, M. S. P. Durgarao, A Padmavathi · 6 authors
Truck platooning uses networking technology and automated driving support systems to join multiple trucks in a group. When these vehicles interact for particular journey stages, such as on highways, they autonomously maintain a predefined, tight spacing among themselves. Platooning improves transportation by making better use of highways, delivering cargo faster, and minimizing congestion in traffic. Therefore, safety and platooning are two important attributes of an intelligent truck system. This paper discusses a quantum-safe blockchain-empowered authentication mechanism for autonomous truck platooning. The proposed idea is to use blockchain to combine multiple nodes and ensure authenticity with the help of an aggregation technique. The proposed design ensures authenticity to the system due to hard assumptions:1) Learning With Error (LWE) and 2) Short Integer Solution (SIS) on random module generated lattice. This paper uses operations over module lattices to be more efficient than general lattices. We can perform operations on module lattices with the help of fast algorithms for polynomial arithmetic.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In the emerging and well-rooted field of Vehicular Adhoc-Networks (VANETs), the imperative of secure content exchange via Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication for better safety emphasizes the importance of strong communication protocols. Implementing Information-Centric Networking (ICN) in VANETs allows for more efficient resource utilization via name-based content requests and delivery techniques. However, the dynamic and open nature of VANETs creates major security risks, necessitating rigorous defence against malicious attacks. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel trust-aware VANET framework that integrates ICN and Blockchain for content security. Our method uses authenticated vehicle data to ensure content integrity across the network, resulting in effective and efficient security measures. Through precise simulation, our technique exhibits resilience against malicious assaults by improving bandwidth utilization, throughput transactions, network content utilization, and content delivery in the face of hostile scenarios. The experimental results confirm the efficacy and feasibility of our proposed technique, highlighting its potential to improve VANET content security in real-world applications.
The rise of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) within intelligent transportation systems has introduced new demands for real-time, scalable, and privacy-preserving authentication mechanisms. Traditional authentication methods, such as Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), are often insufficient in highly dynamic vehicular environments due to their reliance on static credentials and centralized control. This paper proposes an adaptive and context-aware authentication framework that integrates Edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) with blockchain technology to secure vehicular communication. The framework leverages edge- based AI models to assess driver behavior and contextual signals in real time, generating dynamic trust scores for authentication. These scores are verified and recorded through a permissioned blockchain, ensuring tamper-proof identity validation and decentralized access control. The proposed system addresses key challenges including low latency, dynamic trust evaluation, and conditional privacy. Through detailed architectural design and security analysis, this work highlights the potential of hybrid AI-blockchain models to enhance the security, scalability, and accountability of future vehicular networks.
The quick progress of 5G networks has allowed for intelligent driving. The primary environment for intelligent driving is provided by vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), which relay real-time data and communications between moving vehicles and fixed infrastructure. Since the communication is open-access, the message exchanged is vulnerable to privacy and security attacks. To address with this challenge, several authentication schemes have proposed. Nevertheless, the complexity of current these schemes means that re-authenticating vehicle identities every time they reach a new area of infrastructure coverage significantly hampers the overall network’s efficiency. This paper has proposed a handover authentication, called HAFC scheme based on fog computing to achieve fastly re-authentication of vehicles via secure property transfer among infrastructures (fog servers) for 5G-assisted vehicular blockchain networks. The proposed HAFC scheme consists of both stages namely, initial-authentication stage and handover-authentication stage. In security analysis shows that the proposed HAFC scheme’s vehicle to fog server-for both stages is Computational Diffie-Hellma (CDH)-secure. According to the simulation results, the novel handover authentication stage takes only a fraction of the time required for the first one.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as pivotal roles within internet of vehicles (IoV), serving as mobile base stations. However, while expanding coverage and improving mobility, the deployment of UAVs also poses a threat to the integrity and privacy of sensitive data due to open wireless communication channels in IoV. Therefore, preventing unauthorized access and data tampering is critically important between UAVs and vehicles. For the authenticity and legitimacy of the UAV certificate, existing authentication approaches may lead to significant challenges in key management overhead or dependence on a trusted third party. In this paper, a blockchain-based authentication scheme for UAV-assisted IoV system (BASUV) is proposed. This solution enables dependable UAV registration and authentication services, and permits the dynamic addition and removal. Specifically, blockchain is introduced to achieve the decentralized management and distributed trust of the UAV certificate ledger. Furthermore, to prevent information tampering and identity deception, we design CMPES, a novel combined scheme based on multiple public key generators (PKGs) for encryption and signature. Identical key pair in encryption and signature can reduce key generation and management overhead. The security and experimental analysis demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme.
Hengchang Pan, Y. W. Wang, Wei Wang, Ping Cao · 6 authors
Efficient and trusted regulation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is an essential but challenging issue in the future era of the Internet of Low-altitude Intelligence, due to the difficulties in UAVs’ identity recognition and location matching, potential for falsified information reporting, etc. To address this challenging issue, in this paper, we propose a blockchain-based UAV location authentication scheme, which employs a distance bounding protocol to establish a location proof, ensuring the authenticity of UAV positions. To preserve the privacy of UAVs, anonymous certificates and zero-knowledge proof are used. The security of the proposed scheme is analyzed. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency and feasibility of the proposed scheme.
Xiaoqin Feng, Fuliang Lin, Tao Feng, Jianfeng Ma · 6 authors
Secure and efficient identity authentication is a fundamental requirement in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs); however, it remains challenging due to the highly dynamic network topology, stringent latency constraints, and the need for conditional privacy preservation. Existing authentication schemes either rely on public key infrastructures (PKI) with complex certificate management or introduce partially decentralized designs that still depend on trusted authorities, leading to inefficiencies and single points of failure. In this paper, we propose EBDA, an Ethereum-based fully distributed authentication mechanism for VANETs. The core innovation of EBDA is to replace the traditional PKI certificate system with a blockchain-maintained Graph of Trust (GoT). Through three dedicated smart contracts, EBDA fully decentralizes the management of vehicle identities and pseudonyms. Vehicles use pseudonyms to preserve privacy in Vehicle-to-Vehicle communications, while authentication is achieved certificate-free via transitive trust within the GoT. Importantly, latency-sensitive operations like message verification are executed off-chain through local checks, meeting VANETs’ strict real-time requirements. A prototype implementation and extensive evaluations demonstrate that EBDA significantly reduces authentication latency by at least 22.93% compared with representative blockchain-assisted and PKI-based baselines while maintaining low computational and storage overhead. These results confirm the feasibility of deploying GoT-based decentralized authentication in practical VANET environments.
Authentication for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is essential for safe IoV connection. However, because of the peculiar structure of IoV, current authentication schemes heavily rely on Road Side Units (RSUs). An excessive number of RSUs will make it difficult to synchronize updates, which will make system authentication inefficient overall and prevent the reuse of authentication results. Based on this, this paper proposes a blockchain-based secure distributed authentication scheme for IoV. First, data processing and storage are decentralized to the edge of the network to reduce the communication delay and response time with the trusted authority (TA). Second, in the IoV authentication process, smart contract technology is used to achieve automatic triggering of the authentication process, and an optimized Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant Consensus (PBFT) algorithm is designed to add the authentication information to the blockchain ledger so that the authentication results can be reused. Finally, this paper performs formal security verification and informal security analysis using and Real-Or-Random (ROR) oracle model and AVISPA tool. In addition, this paper performs a detailed evaluation of computation overhead and communication overhead and uses SUMO for simulation verification. The security analysis and performance evaluation show that the scheme meets the security requirements of IoV while having less communication and computation overhead.
Sadia Hussain, Shahzaib Tahir, Asif Masood, Hasan Tahir
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is an incipient topic within the wider domain of the Internet of Things (IoT). Using this technology intelligent transportation systems (ITS) can be developed, whose main purpose is to ensure more safety, faster travel, reduced energy consumption and improved vehicle upkeep. Devices connected within the IoV transmit a vast amount of data, which leads to additional costs on the communication network along with data security concerns. This research considers the potential uses of blockchain technology for improving communication between independent vehicles. In this paper, a decentralized system is proposed to enhance the security and performance of financial transactions in the network of autonomous cars based on the Ethereum blockchain. Our system is divided into two modules: car registration and message alert generating. New vehicles are allowed on the network using the smart contract that has been written and published on the Ethereum Remix IDE. This is the contract code attached to the Metamask wallet. Another module, the message alert-generating module, allows an administrator to send alert messages to all registered cars via a web-based system to their wallet for an Ethereum gas cost. It ensures the reliability of data transferred between the self-driving cars through the use of blockchain-based systems. The data is, therefore, confirmed and vetted using the proof of work and stake consensus algorithm to bring out the truth. The transaction being made, the system will see to it that the transaction made is of integrity and trustable. By synching all these technologies and means of reaching an agreement, the blockchain secures not only the means of keeping and retaining the information of the kept within self-driving vehicles but also establishes a strong foundation of highest trust and transparency in the interaction between the vehicles on the network. Accordingly, a well-defined and reliable conceptual design for the communication systems of autonomous vehicles has been proposed. Future work and the unresolved issues of using blockchain for autonomous vehicles have also been deliberated over in detail.
Sixth-generation (6G) communication is emerging as seamless and massive connecting of almost everything. Therefore, vehicles, being extensively linked with human mobility, require a technological pace for compatibility with the 6G era. 6G will also potentially revolutionize the Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. However, this modernization will surface several security challenges in the complex heterogeneous architecture of V2X communication in 6G. Similarly, the expansion of V2X also introduces unconventional security risks and vulnerabilities. This paper aims to provide an overview of the security challenges and solutions for V2X communication in the upcoming 6G era to visualize the future of this research domain. This paper discusses the architecture and standards utilized in 6G enabled V2X communications and provisions a comprehensive analysis of V2X security in Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability, Authentication and Access Control (CIA3) domains. Thereby, we analyze the impact of the emerging technological concepts of Blockchain and Federated Learning (FL) in 6G enabled V2X communication. Thereby, we suggest a Blockchain-enabled FL based generic security architecture for V2X communication in 6G networks. At the conclusive end, the review highlights key lessons learned and the future research directions in the domain of security of V2X communications in the 6G including; Privacy in 3D Fog Computing, Privacy in Augmented Reality, C. Secure Software Defined Networking (SDN), Physical Layer Security In THz Spectrum, SUMO (Simulation of Urban MObility) and Intrusion Detection using AI.
Rabia Khan, Amjad Mehmood, Carsten Maple, Kevin Curran · 5 authors
Strategic investment(s) in vehicle automation technologies led to the rapid development of technology that revolutionised transport services and reduced fatalities on a scale never seen before. Technological advancements and their integration in Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) increased uptake and adoption and pushed firmly for the development of highly supportive legal and regulatory and testing environments. However, systemic threats to the security and privacy of technologies and lack of data transparency have created a dynamic threat landscape within which the establishment and verification of security and privacy requirements proved to be an arduous task. In CAVs security and privacy issues can affect the resilience of these systems and hinder the safety of the passengers. Existing research efforts have been placed to investigate the security issues in CAVs and propose solutions across the whole spectrum of cyber resilience. This paper examines the state-of-the-art in security and privacy solutions for CAVs. It investigates their integration challenges, drawbacks and efficiencies when coupled with distributed technologies such as Blockchain. It has also listed different cyber-attacks being investigated while designing security and privacy mechanism for CAVs.
The collaborative path planning and scheduling can overcome the limitations of single vehicle intelligence to obtain a globally optimal decision strategy in cognitive internet of vehicles (CIoVs). The collaboration of vehicles necessitates the exchange of environmental and decision information, generating massive collaborative computing tasks with strict latency requirements. Leveraging mobile edge computing (MEC) technology, computing tasks can be processed near the vehicles to reduce latency. However, traffic congestion and computational load imbalance seriously affect traffic efficiency and computational latency. In hybrid driving scenarios, it is challenging to fulfill the diverse service requirements of vehicles with different intelligence levels. Moreover, non-collaborative tend to result in traffic congestion due to vehicle aggregation effects, while centralized solutions lack flexibility and have high computational complexity. To address these concerns, a distributed multi-agent reinforcement learning (DMARL) algorithm is proposed for collaborative path planning and scheduling in a blockchain-based collaboration framework. In this framework, we model the communication, traffic situation and task processing of the system and formulate a joint optimization problem to minimize both travel time and computation latency. Last, we convert the scheduling problem for different types of vehicles into Markov decision processes (MDPs) and propose Q-learning-based DMARL algorithm to achieve proactive load balancing of both road infrastructures and MEC nodes (MECNs). Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the comparison schemes in terms of load balance indexes of roads and MECNs, travel time, and computation latency.