Cross-chain Protocol Lightning-C for Internet of Vehicles Environment

Blockchain is gaining popularity as a technology that provides secure data sharing and management for the Internet of vehicles (IoV). The efficient cross-chain communication of data between blockchains in the IoV environment has not been well studied. This paper studies the cross-chain protocol in the IoV environment, and designs a lightning-c cross-chain protocol based on the lightning network. The protocol consists of three steps. The user opens the cross-chain channel through election of nodes, and conducts transactions in the cross-chain channel, then the cross-chain channel is closed and the transaction is broadcasted to the blockchain. Our proposed approach enables efficient interoperability between heterogeneous blockchains.Compared with the traditional cross-chain protocol BTCRelay, it is proved that the lightning-c cross-chain mechanism can greatly improve the throughput of cross-chain transactions.