Reducing Bootstrap Overhead within VANET Blockchain Applications through Pruning

Blockchains within Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) have enjoyed different applications within literature. Certain characteristics, like privacy and data security, are necessary to create a secure network. Blockchains provide different characteristics that can benefit VANETs. Traditional blockchains do not translate well into the highly mobile environments like VANETs. Currently, literature yields progress in adapting these data structures into these networks. However, little discussion has been created about the bootstrapping requirements when nodes join a blockchain network. Bootstrapping requires downloading a large portion of the chain and can create large network loads depending on the chain size. This work sets out to provide a pruning technique demonstrations that prunes in specific time intervals to reduce network and storage load. This method removes unnecessary blocks that are no longer need due to age and irrelevancy to the current road conditions. A discussion on the rationale of why to prune a chain is conducted. Over all, pruning provides a reduction in the overall data sent over the network, which primarily comes from bootstrapping nodes.