A Blockchain-Based Vehicle Platoon Leader Updating Scheme

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.