Toward Secure Data Sharing for the IoV: A Quality-Driven Incentive Mechanism With On-Chain and Off-Chain Guarantees

Currently, data sharing for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) applications has drawn much attention in the framework of developing smart cities and smart transportation. A critical challenge for data sharing is to incentivize users to participate in collecting and sharing data. The traditional incentive mechanism of crowdsourcing is not practical for IoV because of its trust issues. Although blockchain technology has been introduced to address trust issues and security challenges, ensuring trust in off-chain data for the blockchain-based approaches is still an open issue. In this article, we propose a quality-driven auction-based incentive mechanism based on a consortium blockchain that guarantees trust in both on-chain data and off-chain data. We first introduce a consortium blockchain that is used as an open and distributed hyperledger to address the security issue of on-chain data. Then, we formulate the problem as a reverse auction in which the platform acts as an auctioneer that purchases data from users. By utilizing a data quality-driven auction model, the evaluated data quality via expectation maximization is used to ensure the trust in off-chain data. The quality-driven, auction-based incentive mechanism can obtain the high-quality data and optimal social welfare with low social cost. Otherwise, we design a smart contract to perform the data sharing automatically. Finally, the extensive simulations show that our proposed algorithm achieves maximum social welfare, outperforms other solutions, and scales well when the number of users or tasks increase. Moreover, the performance of the smart contract shows its low computing cost.