Blockchain-Based Internet of Vehicles: Distributed Network Architecture and Performance Analysis

The rapid growth of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has brought huge challenges for large data storage, intelligent management, and information security for the entire system. The traditional centralized management approach for IoV faces the difficulty in dealing with real-time response. The blockchain, as an effective technology for decentralized distributed storage and security management, has already showed great advantages in its application of Bitcoin. In this paper, we investigate how the blockchain technology could be extended to the application of vehicle networking, especially with the consideration of the distributed and secure storage of big data. We define several types of nodes such as vehicle and roadside for vehicle networks and form several sub-blockchain networks. In this paper, we present a model of the outward transmission of vehicle blockchain data, and then give detail theoretical analysis and numerical results. This paper has shown the potential to guide the application of blockchain for future vehicle networking.

I. Introduction

With the development of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) technology, a large number of IoV nodes need to access this huge network, and the amount of traffic to be handled is extremely large. At the same time, with the increasing of traffic load on centralized systems, the traditional centralized management and data storage will face significant challenges. Even without the consideration of the economic cost and complex engineering processes, the central server could be the bottleneck of the entire system. Once the server fails, it may break the whole system. It is difficult for different providers to guarantee interoperability and compatibility among nodes belonging to different providers.