Blockchain-Enabled Data Sharing in Connected Autonomous Vehicles for Heterogeneous Networks

In this paper, we consider the use of blockchain for a challenging Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) application scenario of data sharing that has stringent security requirements. We discuss enhanced delegated Proof-of-Stake (dPoS) consensus and combine it with three different reputation schemes, which are Multi-Weight-Subjective-Logic (MWSL), beta, and sigmoid-based reputation schemes. To determine malicious miners in the system, we first compute the overall latency of block generation as the sum of communication, computational, information propagation and queuing latency. We then evaluate the performance of this scheme under simple and orchestrated adversary attack models. We do the same analysis for a heterogeneous network, where we validate our results with a 5G/6G hybrid network. Our results indicate that in large scale networks, MWSL reputation based enhanced dPoS scheme can detect orchestrated attacks in few seconds for 6G networks. Heterogeneous deployment schemes also perform relatively well. In comparison, 4G and 5G perform poorly, and might not be suitable for blockchain implementations.