A Decentralized Blockchain-Based Trust Management Framework for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are one of the pillars of the Internet of Vehicles, they provide plenty of applications ranging from safety to entertainment. Safety applications largely depend on reliable and authentic traffic-related data. However, ensuring the data reliability and authenticity is facing many challenges due mainly to the scalability of VANETs such as the high speed, the long roads, and the open nature of VANETs. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a decentralized Blockchain-based trust management framework (BC-TMF) aiming to compute trust metrics for vehicles. These trust metrics rely on the authenticity of the messages. Each vehicle assesses the authenticity of the received messages in real-time, calculates a local trust metric for the originator of such messages, then shares it with a miner. Periodically each miner aggregates the received trust metrics into global trust metrics, then packs them in a block. To investigate the efficiency and consistency of the proposed framework, extensive simulations are conducted. The obtained results show that the proposed BC-TMF has an excellent capability in computing accurate trust metrics for vehicles. Besides, it outperforms the existing ones in terms of the accuracy of computed trust metrics, particularly for malicious vehicles.