VeSenChain: Leveraging Consortium Blockchain for Secure and Efficient Vehicular Crowdsensing

Vehicular CrowdSensing (VCS) has become a promising paradigm to employ mobile vehicles for performing sensing tasks in supporting location-based services and applications. In traditional VCS, a central agency is highly depended on, from collecting task requests of requesters to employment and reward assignment to workers. However, the centralized manner causes critical problems, such as potential privacy leakage and unexpected free-riding and false-reporting behaviors due to the lack of recorded proofs. The challenging problems hinder the wide-spread deployment of VCS. In this paper, we utilize consomum blockchain to elaborately design a dedicated blockchain, called by VeSenChain, to provision VCS services in a decentralized, authentic and transparent manner. For the implementation of VeSenChain, we develop an interactive protocol to support smart contract based operations among different entities. Stackelberg game approach is further used to formulate and solve the sensing task scheduling problem between a requester and multiple workers, and thus enable optimal smart contract design. Numerical results demonstrate that VeSenChain is effective and efficient for promoting VCS in network security and efficiency.