Safeguarding Cooperative Maneuver Information with Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance

Vehicular communications play a critical role in facilitating cooperative behavior among vehicles, leading to improved road safety and traffic efficiency. By sharing information such as speed, position, and trajectory, vehicles can collaborate to execute complex maneuvers like platooning, intersection crossing, and lane merging. In addition to coordinating maneuvers, vehicles can also communicate to identify critical information associated with a maneuver that needs to be saved for future analysis, particularly in case of accidents. To analyze the feasibility of such scenarios using a classical consensus algorithm, we implemented the PBFT protocol using short-range vehicular communications. Vehicles employ this protocol to agree on which maneuver data is critical, then registered securely using distributed ledger-based techniques. PBFT is combined with a maneuver coordination protocol similar to current standardization efforts by ETSI. The proposed system was tested using hardware-in-the-loop simulations using vehicles' onboard units equipped with ITS-G5 radio communications. Performance results show the feasibility of the proposed system for sufficiently high packet delivery rates.