Empowering Blockchain in Vehicular Environments With Decentralized Edges

In order to enable emerging vehicular Internet of Things (IoT) applications, including fully autonomous driving, more efforts should be done in collecting driving experiences in different road situations. This requires the exchange of information between vehicles as each vehicle has very limited experience. Due to the decentralized feature of vehicular environment, an efficient management of collaborative behaviors among the vehicles becomes particularly important. Blockchain has been attracting great interest recently because it provides a way to reach consensus in decentralized systems. However, existing blockchain systems assume high communication capabilities for vehicles, which is difficult to achieve in a decentralized vehicular environment. Existing studies also assume the existence of networking infrastructure, such as roadside units (RSU). In this paper, we propose a scheme to empower blockchain in vehicular environments without depending on the existing networking infrastructure. The proposed scheme uses a distributed clustering approach to select some vehicles as edge nodes, and the edge nodes maintain the blockchain used to record transactions in a decentralized way. The proposed scheme employs a distributed approach that guides vehicle clustering with the consideration of multiple metrics based on a fuzzy logic algorithm. By using the edge nodes, the proposed scheme solves the communication problem of maintaining a blockchain in a totally decentralized vehicular environment. We use computer simulations to clarify the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of communication performance by comparing it with existing baselines.