autoCoin: Secure Content Sharing Based on Blockchain for Vehicular Cloud

Abstract

A future smart car will be more than a means of transportation, as it will not only move people to a destination without requiring them to drive but will enable people to work or enjoy a trip with entertainment. For this, smart vehicles need to deal with various types of data for safety and infotainment, such as real-time traffic, multi-media contents, documents and weather information. Recently, a fleet of vehicles connected to other vehicles and infrastructure (i.e., road side units) using a legacy or 5G mmWave spectrum has been considered as a platform to cooperate for those new tasks, known as the vehicular cloud or fog. Within the vehicular cloud, data management should consider security, high availability and interoperability between vehicles. However, these are not easily achievable without a centralized service provider; it is difficult for an autonomous P2P system to guarantee data integrity, and it cannot compensate drivers that actively participate in the vehicular cloud. Fortunately, the many successes achieved in the field of crypto-currency raise the possibility of defining incentives that are necessary for a sustainable digital economy. In this paper, we propose autoCoin—an approach that aims to encourage smart vehicles to cooperate to create and exchange infotainment data securely under the assumption of rationality. We introduce a scalable blockchain architecture for autoCoin and a smart contract to exchange contents without third-parties using an off-chain technique. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.