Blockchain-based message communication system for vehicular ad hoc networks
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Abstract
Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are ephemeral networks that enables vehicles to share information about the travel route such as traffic congestion or accidents with other vehicles to help them make real time decisions. A VANET, however, is neither secure nor fault tolerant and its security is usually handled by central certificate authorities plagued with inefficiency. Hence, vehicles in these networks are prone to malicious attacks and messages may not be trustworthy. A blockchain network on the other hand ensures that data is secure and fault tolerant using its distributed and decentralized system. This thesis addresses the following question: How can we determine the trustworthiness of a message sent by a vehicle in the VANET? The answer lies in the blockchain and the methodology is described below. The large network is first partitioned into zones, each zone consisting of road side units (RSUs). Each RSU uses the calculated trust/credibility values of the received messages to form a block in the blockchain. In this thesis, we propose a trust inference model that combines the recommendation from other trusted vehicles as well as dynamic metrics like proximity to event location and the model aggregates them through a probabilistic Bayesian approach. We further study the feasibility of our model by practically implementing the RSUs as nodes on a Hyperledger blockchain framework. We conduct various experiments on blockchain and VANET parameters using the data from Winnipeg Public Works Department. We conclude that the model can tolerate a faulty RSU and that it is not detrimental to the network since the data in the blockchain is distributed.