Blockchain-inspired Distributed Trust in a Smart Vehicular Network System

A smart vehicular network aims at goals of safe operation, and aggregate efficiency, by sharing information between cars, so that traffic information observed by some cars can be used by others out of observation range. However, as is common in multi-agent complex IoT systems, the priorities and intents of the various vehicles are distinct, such as different desired speed, or in contesting rights of way. This leads to a need for security, specifically, establishing a trust in the data generated by vehicles. This security need to be operative at the network level because the individual device security is expensive and not practical. We propose using a blockchain-inspired solution for achieving distributed trust in the data generated in a multi-agent system. We design and implement a discrete-event vehicular network simulator, and demonstrate how it achieves an all-to-all trust when the network is connected, by using just the time and location of generation of a message or data. We conduct simulation experiments to evaluate the impact of using blockchain on network latency of this resource-constrained IoT system.