Blockchain-Based Resource Allocation Mechanism for the Internet of Vehicles: Balancing Efficiency and Security

In the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), the data sharing between the participating vehicles and the roadside units (RSUs) provides intelligent ground transportation with convenience and connectivity. To date, IoV has produced massive heterogeneous traffic data, needing to consume petabytes of computing and spectrum resources. However, due to limited computing resources, vehicles have to offload some tasks to RSUs, raising the issue of resource allocation efficiency in the IoV. This paper focuses on two aspects: the optimization of the resource allocation efficiency on the data processing and transmission, and the security of cloud-based services. Though blockchain technology provides a feasible solution for the safe interaction of IoV information, the consensus process of blockchains still involves much resource consumption. To address the issue, this paper proposes a Blockchain-Based and Resource Allocation Balanced Information Interaction Mechanism (BRAB-IIM) to achieve a balance between efficiency and security. In BRAB-IIM, maximizing the overall interests of the resource trading market and minimizing resource consumption are the two conflicting goals. Meanwhile, a vehicle classification method is proposed, which considers the real-time urgency of interactive information. Additionally, a Hierarchical Delegated Proof of Reputation (hDPoR) consensus mechanism is designed, which combines the reputation value of the vehicle and the priority level of the node vote through prioritizing vehicle demands. Finally, three different optimization algorithms are deployed for the dual-objective optimization of the overall market resource allocation. The experimental results indicate that, compared to the baseline algorithm, the NSGA-II algorithm increases the overall market revenue by 24% under the same energy consumption. Also, it is numerically validated that the BRAB-IIM improves the effectiveness and security of the IoV.