MPoR: A Modified Consensus for Blockchain-Based Internet of Vehicles

Ride-sharing services, such as ride-hailing and carpooling, have become attractive travel patterns for worldwide users. Due to the high dynamic topology, heterogeneous wireless communication mode, and centralization, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is much more vulnerable to security issues such as privacy theft, single point of failure, data island, and unauthorized access, resulting in great security risks, while ride-sharing services provide convenience. Blockchain technology used to solve the security problems of the IoV has become a current research hotspot, including authentication and privacy protection. Nevertheless, the existing algorithms still face challenges such as large amount of computation, low throughput, low scalability, consensus, and node security. Achieving an efficient, lightweight, and scalable secure blockchain-based IoV system still needs to be solved urgently. In this paper, we propose an effective consensus algorithm called Modified Proof of Reputation (MPoR). Firstly, by using the average network access time of the whole network nodes as the filtering threshold, the number of consensus nodes can be controlled adaptively. Then, a new multiweight reputation algorithm is proposed to quantify the reputation value of nodes, so as to detect and eliminate malicious nodes in the consensus node pool. Theoretical analysis and extensive simulation experiments reflect that under the IoV scenario, MPoR can adaptively select the number of consensus nodes, to effectively improve the consensus efficiency. When malicious nodes are less than 1/3 of the total nodes in the network, MPoR can effectively resist latent attack and collusive attack and has strong robustness.