B2vdm: Blockchain Based Vehicular Data Management

Smart interconnected vehicles generate a huge amount of data to be used by a wide range of applications. Although cloud based data management is currently in practice, for many applications serving road safety or traffic regulation, it is utmost important that applications access these data at the site itself for improved quality of service. Road side units (RSUs) play a crucial role in handling these vast amount of vehicular data and serving the running applications in turn. In this current era of edge computing, in-place data access is also proven to be advantageous from cost point of view. As multiple applications from different service providers are interested to access different fragments of these data, a robust access control mechanism is needed to ensure desired level of security as well as reliability for these data. In this paper, we introduce B2VDM, a novel architecture for vehicular data management at RSUs, that provides a seamless access control using Blockchain technology. The proposed B2VDM framework also implements a simple load distribution module, which maintains the reliability by minimizing the number of packet drops at a heavily loaded RSU during peak hours. An extensive evaluation using Etherium Blockchain validates the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.