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Consensus Based Mechanism using Blockchain for Intensive Data of Vehicles

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 Consensus Based Mechanism Using
Blockchain for Intensive Data of Vehicles

Tehreem Ashfaq1 , Muhammad Ahmed Younis2 , Shahzad Rizwan3 ,

Zahid Iqbal4 , Shahid Mehmood4 , and Nadeem Javaid1(B)
1
COMSATS University Islamabad, Islamabad, Pakistan
tehreemashfaq786@gmail.com, nadeemjavaidqau@gmail.com
2
University of Agriculture Faisalabad, Faisalabad, Pakistan
imahmedyounis@hotmail.com
3
COMSATS University Islamabad (CUI), Attock Campus, Attock, Pakistan
shehzad.rizwan@cuiatk.edu.pk
4
Bejing University of Post’s and Telecommunication, Beijing, China
zahid iqbal31@hotmail.com, shahid13m809@gmail.com

Abstract. The explosive development of Intelligent Vehicles (IVs) has

led to a complex network, which is difficult to manage due to the exten-
sive communication of vehicles and storage of vehicles’ data. Due to
increase in number of vehicles, IVs come up with large difficulties. Huge
data generated by IVs is very difficult to be handled due to limited
storage and lack of intelligent management. Many security and privacy
problems are also related to the IV networks. Traditional centralized
approaches are used to deal with limited storage and security issues.
Increasing number of vehicles expand the number of links in network and
also leads to the intensive data. Lack of coordination of vehicles, reliabil-
ity of the network and traffic among vehicles are some of the major issues.
These issues hinder the performance of the vehicle industry. We propose
a consensus based mechanism using blockchain technology to manage the
intensive data and authenticate the data of vehicles in the EV industry.
This mechanism also ensures data privacy, security and also promotes
data immutability. The transactions are stored in distributed ledger to
provide facility of transparency. In a nutshell, blockchain technology is
incorporated in EVs sector to revolutionize the World.

Keywords: Blockchain technology · Consensus mechanism · Intensive

data · Intelligent vehicles

1 Introduction
In the modern era, vehicle sector is getting modernized with the advancement in
the infrastructure and the communication sector. With the immense increase in
the population over the past few years, number of vehicles running on the roads
has also increased. With this advancement, the transport sector has undergone a
whole new driving experience, comprising of autonomous cars, self-driven cars,
c Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
L. Barolli et al. (Eds.): BWCCA 2019, LNNS 97, pp. 44–55, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33506-9_5
 Consensus Based Mechanism Using Blockchain 45

etc. Not just the infrastructure of the vehicles is changing, also new services
are being introduced, particularly the communication services [1]. Blockchain
is an emerging technology. It is a distributed ledger that can record the trans-
actions between two nodes/vehicles managed by a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network.
Blockchain is about the transparency, security and trust without any third party.
Third party is like a centralized system. Blocks are connected to each other
and each block has its own hash. Blockchain is also about transparency; dis-
tributed ledger is managed by network nodes, each having the copy of ledger.
Nowadays, blockchain based P2P smart contracts for Internet Vehicles (IVs) are
one of the recent applications of blockchain which is growing rapidly. With the
increase in IVs, many problems arise, e.g., huge amount of data generated, lim-
ited storage capacity, lack of management, etc. Privacy and security issues also
exist.
According to [1], number of IVs will increase to 140 million by 2030. These
figures show that it is just a matter of time when the conventional vehicles will
totally be replaced by the IVs. Even now, the conventional vehicles are being
equipped with latest technologies. IVs communicate in a P2P manner, which
removes the involvement of the third party. Still, the security issues exist in the
vehicle sector and the vehicle users are hesitant to interact and communicate
with each other. The users personal data can be hacked by the malicious users,
as this data is quite easily accessible and can be tampered.
To overcome the security issues, blockchain technology has been proposed.
Blockchain is an emerging technology which promotes decentralization along
with security, data immutability and transparency [2]. Therefore, people are
migrating towards blockchain technology. In blockchain, data is stored in a dis-
tributed ledger, copy of which is available with all the participants of the network.
All the transactions taking place in a blockchain network are stored in blocks;
each having a unique hash [3].
The blockchain based IV scenario is proposed, which deals with the issues of:
lack of coordination between vehicles and generation of intensive data. It also
manages the storage and channel reliability. The vehicles are added in the net-
work and assigned unique cryptographic identities. The consensus mechanism
is used whenever a new vehicle is added in the network and it requires 51%
positive response. The proposed blockchain network is divided in two separate
branches. i.e., Integrity Chain (I-Chain) and Fraud chain (F-Chain). The val-
idated vehicles and the associated transactions are stored in integrity I-Chain
whereas the malicious users are added to the F-Chain [4]. Figure 1 shows the in-
depth communication between the vehicles and also the following of the smart
contract.

1.1 Motivation

After reviewing the past work done by many authors for secure communication
between vehicles, sellers and buyers in [1,2,4], we have the following motivations
for this paper:
46 T. Ashfaq et al.

Fig. 1. V2V communication using blockchain

• to deal with the issue of unsecured and trustless communication, blockchain

technology should be used,
• to deal with the issue of lack of privacy of IVs, crypto IVTP is used and
• a new secure technique is required to remove the unauthenticated vehicles
from the network.

1.2 Problem Statement

As we are living in a world of automation and latest technologies are being

introduced, each field of life is getting automated and inter connected. Intelligent
Vehicle (IV) is an entity, which is connected with other IVs through internet for
communication purposes. It enables a better vehicular network, still it has many
issues which needs to be addressed like security and privacy issues.
The explosive development of IVs has led to a complex network, resulting
in difficulty in communication and storage of vehicles. Huge amount of data
generated by IVs is very difficult to handle due to limited storage and lack of
intelligent management. Many information security and privacy problems are
also related to the IoV networks [3].
 Consensus Based Mechanism Using Blockchain 47

For promoting distributed storage and security purposes, blockchain technol-

ogy is used. However, channel reliability and coordination among the vehicles is
not considered. Increasing the number of vehicles expand the number of links
and nodes. Ultimately, single loop hole can open the way for attackers. For effi-
cient working of vehicular network, it is necessary that proper coordination exists
between the vehicles. It minimizes the number of malicious vehicles. Range anx-
iety also exists in the vehicular network, i.e., vehicles are reluctant to go on long
travels because of limited resources [4].
To tackle these issues, the blockchain based IV scenario is proposed, which
deals with the issue of: lack of coordination between vehicles, intensive data stor-
age. Proposed work manages the data storage and promotes channel reliability.

2 Related Work

In recent times, researchers have applied BC technology is various areas. Follow-

ing are some related studies;

2.1 Network Communication with Blockchain

Blockchain is an emerging technology so, different authors used this technology

with different domains. There are some works which focused on blockchain based
WSNs. The authors consider the issues of security, data storage constraints of
sensor nodes, computational capability and node failure. In [3], authors identify
the problem of user access control to optimize the network. Proposed solution
considers authenticity of Channel State Information (CSI) using blockchain con-
sensus and deep learning.
In [5], authors deal with the nodes failure issue during data transmission.
There are two main reasons for node failure: mobility and selfishness of nodes.
Firstly, they set a threshold value to check the node failure. In the second step, a
multi-link concurrent tree is built using greedy approach. In this way, transmit-
ting capacity of node is maximized while validating a block transaction time is
decreased. However, they did not consider selection of failure nodes, which leads
to transmission delay and security issues.
In [6] and [7], authors proposed an incentive mechanism for location privacy
protection of users. The proposed structure is divided into sub parts. The data is
sensed by crowd sensing network and sent to the confusion mechanism. Confusion
mechanism protects the data from attacks. Blockchain makes the data temper
proof and maintain its integrity. They compared the non-encrypted traditional
method with proposed encrypted method. Results showed that females are less
concerned for privacy as compared to males. In the paper [8–11], they identified
the problems of data sharing. They proposed the solution on secure data sharing
and data rights management. In [12], the authors proposed novel hybrid net-
work architecture. The proposed architecture consists of two sub parts: (i) core
network (ii) edge network. The proposed network is based on both distributed
network and centralized architecture. They also proposed a scheme based on
48 T. Ashfaq et al.

Proof of Work (PoW) to ensure the privacy and security of a network. In the
proposed architecture, there is no privacy encryption and no user involvement.
In [13], authors used Provable Data Possession (PDP) technique instead of
PoW to obtain better results. They also applied preserving hash function to
compare the existing data of nodes with the new one. The only problem with
PDP is that it can identify the damaged data on nodes, but is unable to recover
it.

2.2 IoT with Blockchain

In complex IoT networks, some technical challenges are being faced. There are
many scenarios and models have proposed for security purposes. However, the
centralized nature of IoT networks create many issues. It is difficult to deal with
the centralized IoT networks. Blockchain provides a secure decentralized IoT
network which manages the IoT devices in a network. In [14], authors proposed
a solution for IoT network which provides scalability. More throughput and
minimum delay in access management framework.
In [15], authors proposed a Distributed BC based Network (DistBlockNet)
for IoT networks. The authors use the advantage of blockchain and Software
Defined Network (SDN) technologies, which solve the issues of scalability, effi-
ciency, availability and security. System is also able to provide threat detection
and data protection. However, distributed architecture for data storage is still
missing.

2.3 Vehicular Communication with Blockchain

The concept of Electric Vehicle, i.e., EV brings new concepts in the market.
Road congestion has increased manifold due to vast increase in the number of
vehicles. To reduce this huge amount of energy, scientific and research community
has focused on the EVs as a source of clean energy [16–20].
In [21], blockchain is integrated with IVs to provide large and secure data
storage. The authors designed multiple blockchain model which consists of five
blockchain based on different data blocks. Results show that this integration
provides large and secure data storage. They achieved high throughput with
increasing data. However, delay also increases.
Branch based blockchain technology for Intelligent Vehicles (IVs) was pro-
posed in [4]. Branching is done at Locally Dynamic blockchain (LDB). It is to
handle the large amount of data generated by IVs. Blockchain is used to keep
track of the data generated by IVs and to verify it. Additionally, the concept of
IV Trust Point (IVTP) is also introduced to build trust. Problem with branching
is that duplicate state changes increase with increasing load.

3 System Model
In smart cities, communication of smart vehicles is not secure. So, we proposed a
secure ITS scenario for the secure communication of the intelligent smart vehicles
 Consensus Based Mechanism Using Blockchain 49

using blockchain which can keep data of smart vehicles and their transactions.
When vehicles communicate with each other, they use proof of work for mining
of blocks. In the proposed model, there is an IVTP which assigns the unique ID
to each vehicle. This IVTP is generated by crypto mechanism. Vehicles use this
IVTP during communication for building the trust and for using the network
services. Each vehicle has its own IVTP known as IVTP-ID of that particular
vehicle. The details of the vehicles are stored in separate blocks and when these
blocks are joined together, a blockchain is formed. Each block has its current
hash and previous hash, time stamp, nonce number and targeted address of the
previous block. When more vehicles are added to the network, the computational
power is increased and the data of vehicles becomes more intensive. From the
user’s perspective, it becomes difficult to deal with such type of data. To deal
with intensive data, consensus based scheme for authentication of data is used.
This scheme is used to add the user to the network on the basis of authenticity
while enhancing the efficiency and performance of the network.

Fig. 2. System model

50 T. Ashfaq et al.

The blockchain based proposed IV scenario deals with the issues of: lack of
coordination between vehicles and intensive data. Moreover, it also deals with
the issues of limited storage and channel reliability. The vehicles are added in the
network and are assigned unique crypto identities, respectively. The consensus
mechanism is used to achieve 51% positive response. The validated vehicles and
the associated transactions are stored in I-chain; whereas, the malicious users
are added to the F-chain [4].
Whenever a new user joins the network, the ledger broadcasts this on the
mobile gateway for all the users. When the broadcast message is received by all
other users then the consensus mechanism is applied to check the authenticity.
Once a user is verified to be authentic then a message is sent to the I-chain; oth-
erwise, if the user is not authentic and a message is sent to the F-chain. Figure 2
shows the proposed system model in which the V2V communication, V2X com-
munication and the central trust point is shown. The idea of this proposed model
is taken from [4].

4 Reasoning of Graphs
In this section, the results are displayed and their discussion is also given. Ini-
tially, when the smart contracts are made and deployed, the transaction and exe-
cution costs are calculated. Simulations are performed on Solidity and RemixIDE
(online platform); Solidity is used for writing the smart contracts and Remix-
IDE is used to deploy the smart contracts. For the testing of smart contracts,
we use Ganache and for the validation of transactions, we use MetaMask. Sim-
ulations are run on the system having specifications: Intel Core i5, 4 GB RAM
and 500 GB storage. Presently, the conversion rate of gas and ether is as follows,
taken from [22].
There are some performance parameters for the proposed system.

• Gas consumption of smart contracts.

• Execution cost for the processing power.
• Transaction cost of operation being performed.

4.1 Execution Cost

The execution cost of a smart contract depends upon the processing power of
the system that how many tasks are performed. The execution cost is directly
proportional to the processing power. The execution cost is the cost of executing
only a certain function.

4.2 Transaction Cost

The transaction cost depends on: the cost of data being sent, operations being
performed and the storage of contract. It can be said that transaction cost is the
sum of the execution cost and the deployment cost.
Consensus Based Mechanism Using Blockchain 51

Fig. 3. Transaction cost

Fig. 4. Execution cost

52 T. Ashfaq et al.

Transaction cost is determined by

Transaction Cost = Gas Used × Gas Price

Figures 3 and 4 shows the transaction and execution costs for the smart
contracts and the functions are deployed in terms of gas. These values are taken
from RemixIDE. Fluctuations can be observed in the gas values for different
functions. The function “transferring balance” has the maximum cost. It can be
observed that the function “transferring balance” has the maximum cost because
it is a function that used more processing power. Similar is the case with the
function “assigning plate number”. This function is intended to add new IVs
to the blockchain network. The transaction costs are always higher than the
execution costs. The reason is because the transaction costs are the costs of
deploying the contract whereas the execution costs are the costs of executing
only a certain function.
The six functions shown in these figures are: assigning the plate number, acti-
vating the car, signing a car, sharing request, transferring balance and assigning
value to car. When the smart contract is deployed, then less gas consumption is
used for the activation function that is 21650 gwei. The gas consumption also
shows the complexity of different functions; the computational power decreases
with the decrease in gas consumption.

Fig. 5. Computational time

In Fig. 5, the increasing trend between the amount of data generated and
the computational time is shown. When the number of vehicles to be added in
the network increases, the data associated with the vehicles also increases. This
in turn increases the computational time which is required to access that data.
It is seen that the increasing trend is exponential in nature. The reason is that
 Consensus Based Mechanism Using Blockchain 53

the computational time is an exponential function of the amount of data stored,

which increases exponentially when more vehicles are added in the network.

Fig. 6. Users’ status

Figure 6 shows the number of total users, authentic users, unauthentic users
and the total number of requests made. By users we mean vehicles, which are
to be added in the network. The authentic users will be added to the I-chain;
whereas, the unauthentic users will be added to the F-chain. The graph is plotted
between the number of participants (vehicles) and the requests made by them.
It is seen that, the proposed model behaves in an efficient manner and is able to
respond to large number of authentic requests made and only a few are marked
as unauthentic.

5 Conclusion
In this paper, the blockchain technology is proposed in the EV sector to solve
the existing issues. The proposed work helped to solve the trust issue among
the users, ensured the data immutability and distinction among the authentic
and unauthentic data. The vehicles are validated by the use of unique crypto
identities being assigned to all the vehicles. All vehicles communicate through
these crypto identities. Each vehicle is connected with its neighbors. When two
vehicles want to communicate, they broadcast a message on network and then a
smart contract is deployed for their communication. The consensus mechanism
is employed to ensure the transparency and the transaction data is stored in
the form of distributed ledger, i.e., copy of data which is available at all nodes.
The proposed work surpasses the existing work as it involves the concept of
branching the vehicles in two different branches instead of keeping the data in a
54 T. Ashfaq et al.

single blockchain. This branching mechanism helps reducing the computational

time and the storage requirement. The concept of IVTP also helps in assigning
the vehicles according to respective trust value. The simulation results prove the
claim that the proposed work is better than the existing works.

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