VERCO: A privacy and data-centric architecture for verifiable cooperative maneuvers

Cooperative, Connected and Automated Mobility (CCAM) applications, enabled by vehicular communica-tions and vehicle automation technologies, are set to increase traffic safety and efficiency. An important feature of CCAM is the potential to decide and coordinate maneuvers among automated vehicles in a more efficient and secure manner, when compared to human drivers. However, maneuver decision and coordination is a rather complex topic due to the multitude of possible maneuvers and the occasional cooperation failures, as caused by issues derived from the use of wireless communications in the vehicular ecosystem, like packet loss or even misbehaving entities. This work focuses on the latter problem by introducing a secure communication design for the decision of general cooperative maneuvers and the distributed storage of related data for accountability purposes using mechanisms based on distributed ledger technologies, while meeting user and data privacy requirements. We present the VERCO (VERifiable COoperation), a scalable geographical-based multi-layered blockchain architecture able to support the high volume of shared vehicular data in order to enhance the security and accountability of cooperative maneuvers, as well as potentially being able to support other vehicular services. To support this architecture, we also provide a performant communication protocol for the decision and negotiation of cooperative maneuvers, based on a new message: the Verifiable Cooperation Message (VCM). The architecture and communication protocol are analyzed and tested employing hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) simulations using two ETSI ITS standard compliant on-board units (OBUs) while deciding maneuvers in a lane-merging scenario. To test the scalability of the architecture a roadside unit (RSU) is put under different stress loads using a variable number of simulated vehicles in the same lane-merging scenario. Experimental results show the feasibility of the communication protocol, with an average delay of 34.68 ms, and the lightweightness of the proposed architecture, with an average overhead of only 2.62 ms for two vehicles and less than 6 ms for dozens of vehicles.& COPY; 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons .org /licenses /by /4 .0/).