Blockchain-Based Privacy-Preserving and Sustainable Data Query Service Over 5G-VANETs

Intelligent Transport Systems (ITSs) play an important role in future smart city design to improve traffic safety and traffic congestion by sharing data collected by vehicles. For sharing the traffic data with other vehicles, the vehicular sensory data are usually uploaded to the cloud server. However, existing data sharing systems for VANETs cannot provide selective data with sufficient privacy protection. Moreover, some schemes also cannot ensure stable data accessibility and the integrity of retrieved data. On the other hand, with the improvements such as lower latency, higher capacity, and increased bandwidth, 5G technology brings more possibilities to future applications. The join of the software-defined networks (SDNs) also offers efficient and effective network management. This paper proposes a primitive vehicular communication system named blockchain-based privacy-preserving and sustainable data query service. The proposed scheme is designed to realize stable data accessibility by leveraging smart contracts and blockchain oracle. With the help of 5G technology and P2P file-sharing system, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), the proposed scheme aims to support video downloading files with searchable capability and fairness. An incentive token mechanism is also equipped. The merit of auditability is ensured by Ethereum blockchain platform to support the accountability. Besides, we also evaluate its networking performance via SUMO and NS-3 simulators. Our simulation results show that the request-response delay of BPSDQS is less than existing blockchain-based proxy re-encryption (PRE) scheme. Our simulation results also showed that the average request-response delay in our scheme can saving up to 98%.