Secure Message Handling in Vehicular Energy Networks Using Blockchain and Artificially Intelligent IPFS

In the underlying work, the problems faced during message dissemination in the conventional Vehicular Energy Networks (VENs) like lack of security, breach of personal identities, absence of trust between vehicle owners, etc., are tackled. In this study, a Blockchain (BC) based announcement system is proposed for VENs to ensure secure and reliable announcement dissemination in the proposed network. The proposed system is a three-layered system comprising message dissemination layer, storage layer and BC layer. In the first layer, all the vehicles are registered through a Certificate Authority (CA), which ensures only the legitimate vehicles become part of the proposed network and interact with each other. Later, in the second layer, the data sent by the vehicles is stored at the artificial intelligence based Interplanetary File System (IPFS), which is incorporated with the Road Side Units (RSUs). This ensures reduction in storage cost and data availability. Besides, vehicle owners’ privacy is ensured by concealing the real identities of the vehicles. Moreover, the hashes of the data stored in the IPFS are stored in BC in the third layer. Also, lightweight trustworthiness verification of the vehicles, reputation based incentivization and concealing predictable trends in vehicles’ reputation scores are performed in the same layer. Overall, the novelty of the proposed work lies in the fact that the proposed system efficiently tackles different problems encountered in the existing systems simultaneously. Through extensive simulations, it is inferred that the computational time is reduced by 15–18% and the storage overhead is reduced by 80–85%, respectively when storing hash of data on the BC network as compared to storing actual data on the network.