Blockchain Papers

Yuanhang Qi, M. Shamim Hossain, Jiangtian Nie, Xuandi Li

No abstract is available for this record.

Wilson S. Melo, Luiz Vicente Gomes Tarelho, Bruno A. Rodrigues, Alysson Bessani · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Jyotir Moy Chatterjee, Palvadi Srinivas Kumar, Abhishek Kumar, B. Balamurugan

The “Big Four” advancements to come are starting to compel themselves to the fore as associations fiddle with any semblance of artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain (BC), internet of things (IoT), and big data (BD). Be that as it may, as these four springs from their embryonic stages, issues, and concerns are being paid attention to about their development. BC has impeded in its reception and development; however, its application is wide and diverse. In this way, it can profit, and help advantage, any semblance of AI and IoT. Be that as it may, BC can likewise have a critical task to carry out in aiding along with IoT. The development of IoT is as yet moving along, yet it also has hindered on the grounds that many have understood that acing this system of smart ‘things’ is far harder than they could have envisioned. Issues of security and courses of events of execution have caused the publicity around IoT to cool off. In a comparable vein, this has additionally occurred in BC. It is on the grounds that IoT and BC end up in comparative spots with regards to the selection that their mix might have the capacity to enable each other to out and comprehend a portion of the noteworthy worries that have hounded them exclusively. BC is no more in its early stages, yet it is the latest till now. Comparative proclamations can be done regarding the IoT. The buzz around BC utilization in IoT, be that as it may, is undeniably later. The association of the two skirts on the untested—and right now, the unapplied. In the IoT situation, the square chain and, when all is said in done, peer-to-peer methodologies could assume an essential job in the advancement of decentralized and data-serious applications running on billions of gadgets, saving the security of the clients. In this chapter, we will try to provide a detailed overview about this linkage between BC, Bitcoin, and IoT. We will focus on how IoT problems can be solved using the help of BC technology and vice versa.

Athos Cotta Couto

Since Bitcoin and the blockchain were proposed in 2008, distributed ledger technologies and cryptocurrencies have spanned several areas of research. One of the biggest challenges of the field is how to scale the distributed system to support a higher transaction throughput, keeping a safe, distributed, and permissionless network. This work builds on top of the current blockchain and directed acyclic graph distributed ledger technologies literature and proposes a simple, fast and predictable algorithm to reach network consensus. It builds a model to formalize consensus on a DAG DLT and performs experiments to validate the feasibility of the proposed algorithm.

Zuobin Ying, Longyang Yi, Maode Ma

Autonomous vehicle platoon is a promising paradigm towards traffic congestion problems in the intelligent transportation system. However, under certain circumstances, the advantage of the platoon cannot be fully developed. In this paper, we focus on the highway Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) charging problem. We try to let the opportunistic platoon pass the ETC as a whole. There are three main issues in this scenario. Firstly, the opportunistic platoon is temporarily composed; vehicles do not trust each other. Secondly, single vehicle may try to escape from the ETC charging by following the platoon. Finally, platoon members may collude with each other and try to underreport the number of vehicles in the platoon so as to evade payment. To solve these challenges, we propose a blockchain-based efficient highway toll paradigm for the opportunistic platoon. The driving history, credential information of every registered vehicle, is recorded and verified from the blockchain. A roadside unit (RSU) is adopted to distinguish the single vehicle from the platoon and in charge of lane allocation. Additionally, an aggregate signature is introduced to accelerate the authentication procedure in the RSU. We analyse the potential security threats in this scenario. The experimental result indicates that our scheme is efficient and practical.

Ahmed Didouh, Anthony Bahadir Lopez, Yassin El Hillali, Atika Rivenq · 5 authors

Cooperative intelligent transportation system (C-ITS) applications are generally susceptible to position spoofing-dependent attacks such as Sybil and DDoS attacks due to a lack of established solutions. This paper presents a novel cyber-physical blockchain cryptographic architecture to help prevent position spoofing attackers from becoming validated nodes in C-ITS applications. The solution also guarantees security requirements including the non-trivial non-repudiation in light of these and other attacks. With a use case of electronic toll collection (ETC), our architecture implements techniques based on Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) measurements in conjunction with blockchain authentication methods such as Proof-of-Location and smart contracts to determine the legitimacy of a node. We demonstrate our solution in experiments using ITS-G5 Cohda Wireless technology (a Road Side Unit and two On-Board Units programmed with the ITS Vanetza stack) with functionalities specified by the European Telecommunications Standardization Institute (ETSI). From our experimental results from several driving-based data gathering tests, we discovered that our solution is able to cope with noise and relative velocity challenges because it incorporates both OBUs and RSUs in the Proof of Location computation steps. In light of this, the proposed architecture may also be applicable to govern V2X in general.

Hao Liang, Yong Zhang, Han Xiong

In urban rail transit systems, the intelligent driving system is gradually replacing manual driving for its high safety, punctuality, and stopping accuracy. With the development of big data analytics, the data-driven intelligent driving system becomes a research focus. Traditional datadriven intelligent driving systems suffer from inadequate data. Due to lacking effective incentives and trust, data from different urban rail operators cannot be shared directly. In this paper, we propose a framework that uses blockchain technology to realize sharing and collaborative training of intelligent driving models between operators. In this framework, we use blockchain-based distributed federated reinforcement learning methods to complete intelligent driving calculations. We use smart contracts to implement the management of the entire federal reinforcement learning. Operators use local historical data to participate in intelligent driving training based on Q-network by exchanging encrypted model parameters, and optimize the safety distance, energy consumption, and punctuality of urban rail transit systems. Simulation results show that our proposed distributed federated reinforcement learning method can significantly improve the intelligent driving system performance.

Antonio Bucchiarone, Martina De Sanctis, Nelly Bencomo

The mobility of people is at the center of transportation planning and decision-making of the cities of the future. In order to accelerate the transition to zero-emissions and to maximize air quality benefits, smart cities are prioritizing walking, cycling, shared mobility services and public transport over the use of private cars. Extensive progress has been made in autonomous and electric cars. Autonomous Vehicles (AV) are increasingly capable of moving without full control of humans, automating some aspects of driving, such as steering or braking. For these reasons, cities are investing in the infrastructure and technology needed to support connected, multi-modal transit networks that include shared electric Autonomous Vehicles (AV). The relationship between traditional public transport and new mobility services is in the spotlight and need to be rethought. This article proposes an agent-based simulation framework that allows for the creation and simulation of mobility scenarios to investigate the impact of new mobility modes on a city daily life. It lets traffic planners explore the cooperative integration of AV using a decentralized control approach. A prototype has been implemented and validated with data of the city of Trento.

Arpit Shukla, Pronaya Bhattacharya, Sudeep Tanwar, Neeraj Kumar · 5 authors

In Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV) ecosystems, intelligent toll gates (ITGs) connect nearby metropolitan cities through smart highways. At ITGs, existing solutions integrate blockchain (BC) and deep-learning schemes to leverage trusted and responsive analytics support for connected smart vehicles (CSVs) at ITGs. BC eliminates third-party intermediaries, and secures payments between vehicle owners (VO) and governing authorities (GA). Deep-Learning, on the other hand, facilitates accurate predictions for diverse and complex urban traffic conditions. However, due to fixed toll pricing schemes based on connected smart vehicles (CSV) type, VOs suffer from variable delays at different lanes due to dynamic congestion scenarios. To address the research gaps of such a fixed pricing schemes, we propose a BC-envisioned scheme DwaRa, that operates in three phases. In the first phase, future traffic is predicted based on Markov queues to balance the congestion at different lanes at ITGs efficiently. Then, we propose a novel spatially induced-long-short term memory (SI-LSTM) model to predict current traffic and weather based on historical repositories. Second, based on inputs by the Markov model, SI-LSTM, lane type, and vehicle type, a dynamic pricing algorithm is presented to improve the quality of experience (QoE) of the VO. Finally, based on dynamic price fixation between the VO and the GA, smart contracts (SCs) are executed and transactional data is secured through BC. The proposed scheme is compared against parameters like average mean-squared error (MSE), predicted traffic, scalability, interplanetary file system (IPFS) storage, computation (CC), and communication cost (CCM). At n = 100 test samples, and arrival rate β = 80, the obtained MSE is 0.0012, with a peak average value of 0.00526. The overall CC is 45.88 milliseconds (ms) and CCM is 53 bytes that indicate the proposed scheme efficacy against conventional approaches.

Rhys Bowden, Paul Keeler, A. E. Krzesinski, Peter Taylor

In the original Bitcoin paper and other research papers since, it is assumed that Bitcoin blocks are mined at the instants of a homogeneous Poisson process. Based on blockchain block arrival data and stochastic analysis of the block arrival process, we demonstrate that this is not the case. We present a framework for studying the block arrival process, including two refined mathematical models for block arrivals, determined by combining models for a period of constant difficulty and how the difficulty evolves over time.

Pranav Kumar Singh, Roshan Singh, Sunit Kumar Nandi, Kayhan Zrar Ghafoor · 6 authors

In the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), vehicles communicate wirelessly with other vehicles, sensors, pedestrians, and roadside units. IoV is aimed at improving road safety, driving comfort, and traffic efficiency. However, IoV is exposed to a range of threats to security and privacy. The presence of dishonest and misbehaving peers in the system is of a major concern, which may put lives in danger. Thus, establishing trust among these probable untrusted vehicles is one of the most significant challenges of such a network. The critical pitfalls of existing and traditional mechanisms are scalability, a single point of failure, maintaining the quality of service, verification, and revocation and dealing with sparsity, consistency, availability, efficiency, robustness, privacy concerns are some of the biggest challenges to be addressed. Blockchain technology, with its great success in applications like cryptocurrencies and smart contracts, is considered as one of the potential candidates to build trust in IoV. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based decentralized trust management scheme using smart contracts. Specifically, we introduce the concept of blockchain sharding for reducing the load on the main blockchain and increasing the transaction throughput. Our proposal has two key contributions: blockchain to maintain and update reliable and consistent trust values across the network and incentive scheme to encourage peers to perform well. We also conduct extensive experiments, which demonstrate the implementation feasibility of proposed mechanisms in the real world.

Uzair Javaid, Muhammad Naveed Aman, Biplab Sikdar

Recent developments in IoT have facilitated advancements in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) with autonomous vehicles and roadside infrastructure as its key components. IoV aims to provide new innovative services for different modes of transport with adaptive traffic management and enables vehicles to broadcast messages to improve traffic safety and efficiency. However, due to nontrusted environments, it is difficult for vehicles to evaluate the credibility of the messages that they receive. Therefore, trust establishment in IoV is a key security concern that is constantly limited by scalability challenges. This article proposes a blockchain-based protocol for IoV using smart contracts, physical unclonable functions (PUFs), certificates, and a dynamic Proof-of-Work (dPoW) consensus algorithm. The blockchain, in conjunction with contracts, provides a secure framework for registering trusted vehicles and blocking malicious ones. PUFs are used to assign a unique identity to each vehicle via which trust is established. Certificates are issued by roadside units that preserve the privacy of vehicles, whereas the dPoW consensus allows the protocol to scale according to the incoming traffic generated by the vehicles. To demonstrate the feasibility and scalability of the proposed protocol, security and performance analyses are presented. A case study is also discussed along with a comparative analysis, which confirms that our protocol can provide superior decentralized trust management for IoV.

Vikas Hassija, Vatsal Gupta, Sahil Garg, Vinay Chamola

The exponential surge in the number of vehicles on the road has aggravated the traffic congestion problem across the globe. Several attempts have been made over the years to predict the traffic scenario accurately and consequently avoiding further congestion. Crowdsourcing has come forward as one of the most adopted methods for predicting traffic intensity using live data. However, the privacy concerns and the lack of motivation for the live users to help in the traffic prediction process have rendered existing crowdsourcing models inefficient. Towards this end, we present an advanced blockchain-based secure crowdsourcing model. Not only does our model ensure privacy preservation of the users, but by incorporating a revenue model, it also provides them with an incentive to participate in the traffic prediction process willingly. For accurate and efficient traffic jam probability estimation, our work proposes a neural network-based smart contract to be deployed onto the blockchain network. The results reveal that the proposed model is highly efficient in terms of attaining high participation and consequently obtaining highly accurate predictions.

Yongxin Ji, Ronghui Hou, King‐Shan Lui, Hui Li

The platoon-based driving pattern, a cooperative driving pattern for a leader and a number of followers, is a good way to deal with some traditional traffic issues and brings many benefits when performing special platoon tasks. However, it's possible for each platoon member to be fully controlled by attackers, especially the leader, which may cause severe damage to the platoon stability. In this paper, we propose a vehicle platoon leader updating scheme in vehicular networks based on blockchain techniques and reputation management mechanism, so as to ensure that the most trusted platoon member acts as leader. In this scheme, according to received warning messages of traffic events, each platoon member evaluates others' reputations in the form of offsets. Using the designed reputation blockchain with Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus scheme, miners generate blocks in turn and wait for others' verification. If a block successfully passes the consensus process, it will be formally added to the blockchain, which can reflect all platoon members' current reputation values. In addition, we also have to guarantee that the miner group is composed of several platoon members with high reputation and the leader serves as a miner. In this way, the scheme both meets the real-time requirement of reputation management and saves communication overhead compared with existing schemes. Finally, we analyze the proper functioning and security of our proposed scheme.

Yuchuan Fu, Changle Li, F. Richard Yu, Tom H. Luan · 5 authors

Inappropriate lane following and changing behaviors of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) can result in accidents, such as rear-end collision and side collision. To remedy that, the use of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for autonomous driving decisions is currently a widely used promising solution. In this case, the accuracy and effectiveness of such a machine learning (ML) model is quite essential for this artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled CAVs. This article proposes a blockchain-based collective learning (BCL) framework for autonomous lane-changing systems. Four key issues, namely, learning efficiency, data security, users' privacy, as well as communication burden, are addressed by applying collective learning, vehicular blockchain, and knowledge transfer. First, we model the lane-changing problem as a DRL process and learn the autonomous lane-changing strategy through the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm. Second, a single CAV involves a limited number of driving scenarios, and the independent learning method has the problem of inefficiency. Therefore, we propose a collective learning framework to utilize the “collective intelligence” shared by CAVs. Third, a vehicular blockchain is then applied to ensure the security and privacy of the user and data. In addition, the introduction of the blockchain can incentivize more users to participate in collective learning. Finally, in order to accelerate the learning process and achieve higher level performance while further reducing the communication burden, we use the corresponding knowledge extracted from the ML model such as human learning, as privileged information for sharing instead of directly sharing local ML models. Extensive simulation results validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposal in terms of learning efficiency, driving safety, as well as system security and robustness.

Alina Buzachis, Antonio Celesti, Antonino Galletta, Maria Fazio · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Vittorio Astarita, Vincenzo Pasquale Giofrè, Giuseppe Guido, Alessandro Vitale

This paper intends to present some ideas for the implementation of cooperative ITS systems based on the Blockchain Technology (BT) concept. Blockchain technology has been recently introduced and, in this paper, we discuss a system that is based on a dedicated blockchain, able to involve both drivers and city administrations in the adoption of promising and innovative technologies that will create cooperation among connected vehicles. The proposed blockchain-based system can allow city administrators to reward drivers when they are willing to share travel data. The system manages in a special way the creation of new coins which are assigned to drivers and institutions participating actively in the system. Moreover, the system allows keeping a complete track of all transactions and interactions between drivers and city management on a completely open and shared platform. The main idea is to combine connected vehicles with BT to promote Cooperative ITS use and a better use of infrastructures.

Carla Fabiana Chiasserini, Paolo Giaccone, Giovanni Malnati, Michele Macagno · 5 authors

Several applications for connected cars leverage the mobility information periodically broadcasted by cars through standard vehicle-to-vehicle messages. We propose an architecture in which each car generates and sends reports including the messages received from its neighbors to the access network infrastructure. The infrastructure collects and stores the received reports through multiple blockchains, each of them referring to a different geographical area. A smart contract is then executed to verify the spatial coherence among the received data. We implement a proof-of-concept of such a solution using Hyperledger Fabric, and we investigate the scalability of our solution in terms of resource consumption in a MEC system.

Chen Chen, Tingting Xiao, Tie Qiu, Ning Lv · 5 authors

To improve the urban traffic condition and reduce accidents, we propose a platoon-driving model for autonomous vehicles in a free-flow traffic state in this article. This model allows vehicles with successful path matching to be grouped in a platoon and led by the platoon head (PH). In addition, a PH selection scheme is introduced to provide an incentive for vehicles to be PHs and maintain the dynamic update of platoons. Next, a smart contract is employed to enable the payment based on a blockchain between the PH and platoon members (PMs), avoiding the malicious and false payments. The numerical results show that the platoon model is superior to the individual driving model in terms of fuel consumption. The comparison between carpooling and noncarpooling modes within the platoon shows that our model has a better performance in terms of PH revenue and PM's service charge.

Aleksandr Kapitonov, Ivan Berman, Vadim Manaenko, Vyacheslav Rzhevskiy · 6 authors

The article describes the concept of a decentralized architecture of a traffic management system for mobile vehicles and is a continuation of the results presented in the previous article “Blockchain-based protocol of autonomous business activity for multi-agent systems consisting of UAVs.. Robonomic protocol is the basis for the system architecture - a combination of the decentralized Ethereum computer, the IPFS distributed file system, Robot Operating System and market mechanisms. In particular, its focused on the principle of communication between nodes of the traffic management system and the stages of the unmanned mission. As a proof of concept, two experiments on the integration of the proposed architecture are presented: air quality measurements using unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and water quality measurements using unmanned surface vessels (USV). Our work demonstrates that distributed ledger and smart contracts technologies are applicable to the traffic management system and increases the transparency and immutability of the data.

Maxime Guériau

Nowadays, urban environments suffer from recurrent traffic jams and their associated side effects. In order to cope with this issue, several solutions were proposed, mostly relying on road-operated traffic management strategies. Recent studies show the potential of connected and automated cars to improve traffic by adapting individual behaviors. For instance, thanks to autonomous decision-making capabilities, platoon systems enable a group of vehicles to travel attached to each other by a virtual link. Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) empowered by Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) can be used to control a fleet of cars in a decentralized way. This paper applies this concept for dynamic platoon vehicles system through a multi-agent model based on Newtonian physics to achieve a self-organization at the. The behavior can be improved by offering more computing power or a better knowledge of the environment thanks to a micro-service division. In this proposal, the vehicle is considered to be a physical agent with personal behavior divided into three layers : perception based on sensor, decision based on physics simulation and application helped by embedded robotics.

Anil Saini, Shreyansh Sharma, Palash Jain, Vikash Sharma · 5 authors

With the rapid advancement in internet connectivity, Connected Vehicle network is becoming a promising technology in the current years. However, the increased connectivity most often results in intensifying risk of cyber security threats. In this regard, the network of connected vehicle is also vulnerable to various cyber-attacks. This paper discussed the security issues with connected Priority Vehicle. A priority vehicle must ensure the high level of security otherwise, the results would be devastating and the consequences might be very serious. To ensure the safe and secure movement of connected priority vehicle on the road using blockchain technology. In our proposed system, the priority vehicle movement is controlled by blockchain network, and it only accept messages and signals from blockchain authorized nodes. In particular, the priority vehicle's location, speed and travel time are the important parameters that we secure using blockchain network. This paper also discusses the possible attacks on the priority vehicles and show how our solution can mitigate these attacks. Here it justifies the effectiveness and performance of our security solution using simulation and proves that the blockchain technology shows the potential application towards securing the information in the connected vehicle network.

Zuobin Ying, Maode Ma, Longyang Yi

Autonomous Vehicle Platoon (AVP) is the most promising solution to various problems in the Intelligent Transportation System. However, how to effectively manage the join and leaving vehicles, and ensure the profit of the platoon leader remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a dynamic AVP management protocol by implementing Ethereum. Vehicle who wants to join and leave the platoon has to communicate with the platoon leader, and all messages will be related to the corresponding transactions regulated by the smart contract. Considering the cost efficiency of the AVP system, a hybrid chain model is constructed. The public chain provides with certification records. All platoon message communication records will be stored on the privacy chain and will be upload to the public chain as platoon operation incident record. The evaluation result and security analysis indicate that our proposed scheme is practical for AVP scenario in terms of both efficient and secure.

Saeed Asadi Bagloee, Madjid Tavana, Glenn Withers, Michael Patriksson · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.