AI, Blockchain, and Vehicular Edge Computing for Smart and Secure IoV: Challenges and Directions

Internet of Things (IoT) is turning into an undeniably developing point of discussion in both research and industrial fields. A key area that is witnessing a quick development in the utilization of IoT devices is the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), which allows information exchange among vehicles and infrastructures. Notably, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been widely adopted for solving challenging vehicular problems and managing the IoV infrastructure. Despite the advantages AI carries for IoV, its deployment can be negatively affected by lacking computation resources and processing unreliable data. On the other hand, Blockchain is a decentralized and distributed peer-to-peer network architecture that can be employed to empower security and resist against undesirable data modification. However, integrating both technologies (i.e., AI and Blockchain) exhausts, even more, the IoV infrastructure. Therefore, we present in this paper an overview discussing the AI and Blockchain approaches and models for IoV and propose a new Vehicular Edge Computing based architecture embedding both technologies and overcoming the aforementioned limitations. We then discuss the main challenges and give notice to the concerned parties and stakeholders about promising directions that arise from enabling the three technologies for providing smart, secure, and efficient IoV.