NeoStarling: An Efficient and Scalable Collaborative Blockchain-Enabled Obstacle Mapping Solution for Vehicular Environments

The Vehicular Self-Organizing Network (VANET) is a burgeoning research topic within Intelligent Transportation Systems, holding promise in enhancing safety and convenience for drivers. In general, VANETs require large amounts of data to be shared among vehicles within the network. But then two challenges arise. First, data security, privacy, and reliability need to be ensured. Second, data management and security solutions must be very scalable, because current and future transportation systems are very dense. However, existing Vehicle-to-Vehicle solutions fall short of guaranteeing the veracity of crucial traffic and vehicle safety data and identifying and excluding malicious vehicles. The introduction of blockchain technology in VANETs seeks to address these issues. But blockchain-enabled solutions, such as the Starling system, are too computationally heavy to be scalable enough. Our proposed NeoStarling system focuses on proving a scalable and efficient secure and reliable obstacle mapping using blockchain. An opportunistic mutual authentication protocol, based on hash functions, is only triggered when vehicles travel a certain distance. Lightweight cryptography and an optimized message exchange enable an improved scalability. The evaluation results show that our collaborative approach reduces the frequency of authentications and increases system efficiency by 35%. In addition, scalability is improved by 50% compared to previous mechanisms.