Increasingly, connected cars are becoming a decentralized data platform. With greater autonomy, they have growing needs for computation and perceiving the world around them through sensors. While todays generation of vehicles carry all the necessary sensor data and computation on board, we envision a future where vehicles can cooperate to increase their perception of the world beyond their immediate view, resulting in greater safety, coordination and more comfortable experience for their human occupants. In order for vehicles to obtain data, compute and other services from other vehicles or road side infrastructure, it is important to be able to make micro payments for those services and for the services to run seamlessly despite the challenges posed by mobility and ephemeral interactions with a dynamic set of neighboring devices. We present MOTIVE, a trusted and decentralized framework that allows vehicles to make peer to peer micropayments for data, compute and other services obtained from other vehicles or road side infrastructure within radio range. The framework utilizes distributed ledger technologies including smart contracts to enable autonomous operation and trusted interactions between vehicles and nearby entities.
The 5G Automotive Association (5GAA) is standardizing 5G cellular technology for V2X and ITS applications @cite_13 , which is expected to advance connected vehicle technologies. A secure communication scheme for V2X applications is presented in @cite_16 , which proposes a ring-based signature scheme in combination with multi-party smart contracts to ensure secure data sharing in a V2X environment. Merlin @cite_9 contributes a file sharing protocol for intermittently connected vehicles in V2X applications. Ahn @cite_14 contribute a file dissemination protocol for dual radio vehicular platform, which calculates the optimal content dissemination model for V2X applications. The literature on communication @cite_13 @cite_16 and data dissemination @cite_9 @cite_14 emphasizes the need to manage the data and service exchanges within the short contact duration. To these, our work contributes a novel link prediction algorithm as well as the use of trust-based micropayments.
@cite_14 @cite_9 @cite_16 @cite_13
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Disseminating shared information to many vehicles could incur significant access fees if it relies only on unicast cellular communications. We consider the problem of efficient content dissemination over a vehicular network, in which vehicles are equipped with two kinds of radios: a high-cost low-bandwidth, long-range cellular radio, and a free high-bandwidth short-range radio. We formulate and solve an optimization problem to maximize content dissemination from the infrastructure to vehicles within a predetermined deadline while minimizing the cost associated with communicating over the cellular connection. Short range vehicle to vehicle and device to device communications are of growing interest due to their utility for vehicular safety and infotainment applications as well as for improving the capacity of cellular networks. These mobile systems are characterized by ephemeral, stochastic links. We consider a fundamental problem in this domain -- how to maximize the amount of useful content downloaded by a client from a server over an encounter that lasts a random amount of time. We assume that the distribution of link duration is known or estimated based on historical as well as real-time measurements. We present MERLIN (Maximum Expected download over Random LINks), a single-phase file request protocol that is provably optimal. We evaluate MERLIN comprehensively via simulations based on both ideal link duration distributions as well as empirical distributions obtained from real vehicular mobility traces (from Taxis in Shanghai and Buses in Chicago). We also present two Contiki OS-based implementations of MERLIN (with local and remote calculations) evaluated on the Tmote Sky wireless embedded platform. Autonomous connected vehicles are a main concept in the future of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) since they provide an increase in safety and road efficiency. The management and coordination of the connected vehicles is based on periodic communications among the vehicles involved in the network, and with their surrounding environment. However, a major concern regarding this information sharing process is how to provide a secure transmission while fulfilling the latency requirements. Here we propose the use of a joint paradigm to securely manage the inter-vehicular communications. First, a ring-signature based scheme is applied to verify the identity of the vehicles joining the network. Second, the information is shared among the vehicles and consensually verified using a blockchain-based mechanism using secure communication channels created by multi-party smart contracts. The proposed protocol fulfills the stringent requirements in latency for vehicular networks by means of almost instantaneous communications while providing an anonymous secure system for the members of the network relying on cryptographic primitives.