B-IoMV: Blockchain-based onion routing protocol for D2D communication in an IoMV environment beyond 5G

Blockchain technology's popularity in terms of security, privacy, traceability, and trust is being applied in various major applications concerning connected autonomous vehicles. One of the most sensitive applications is military operations. We do not compromise with either security, privacy, trust, or communication latency of connected military vehicles, i.e., Internet of military vehicles (IoMVs). Achieving anonymity along with the security and privacy of sender, receiver, and data path for IoMVS is still an open question. Efforts we have made to address the aforementioned issue by proposing a blockchain-based onion routing protocol for IoMVs, i.e., B-IoMV, to achieve secure, trusted, and anonymous D2D communication. We studied the working of onion routing and presented a blockchain and token-based solution to strengthen the security and anonymity of IoMVs. A blockchain-based solution is quite costly and we use InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to make the proposed B-IoMV system cost-effective. Finally, results show that the proposed B-IoMV system achieved better communication latency, data storage cost, and network bandwidth utilization. (C) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.