Off-chain solution for scalable blockchain-based vehicular network

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles are rapidly developing a technology that has the potential to greatly impact the traditional automobile industry. The autonomous vehicle technology promises safer driving and more efficient vehicles than the current human operated vehicles. These vehicles are capable of constantly communicating information such as current position, speed and direction to other vehicles in real-time. The industry accepted model for managing communication between autonomous vehicles is by wirelessly connecting the vehicles by means of fixed roadside units via an ad hoc peer-to-peer vehicular network. As wireless networks are easily compromised, vehicular networks must be secured against any unwanted tampering. Recent research involving incorporating blockchain technology into the vehicular networks have shown promising results to secure the vehicular networks. However, conventional blockchain-based vehicular networks can suffer from performance degradation and limited scalability. One way of improving the performance and scalability of a blockchain-based vehicular network is by carrying out most of the data processing usually associated with the conventional blockchain outside of the blockchain. This study aims to show that the performance and scalability issues in a blockchain-based vehicular network can be improved by incorporating an off-chain network into the vehicular network. Simulations of vehicular network operations under different conditions were carried out to measure the network performance and scalability. Performance of the blockchain network was measured in terms of data throughput, data processing latency, and growth in data size. The results from the simulations for the conventional blockchain-based network and off-chain assisted network were compared. The simulation results showed that the off-chain assisted blockchain network performed and scaled better than the conventional blockchain network. Results of the simulations of the 80 nodes blockchain network showed that the off-chain assisted network improved the throughput by 17 times while lowering the latency by 99%, and the data size by 78% when compared to the conventional blockchain network.