6Blocks: 6G-enabled trust management scheme for decentralized autonomous vehicles

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a 6G-envisioned blockchain (BC)-based scheme for cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) ecosystems (termed as 6Blocks), which optimizes the edge-resource provisioning of 5G C-V2X nodes via network function virtualization (NFV)-enabled infrastructure. 6Blocks operates in three phases. In the first phase, a secure data aggregation through 6G sensors is performed at the data plane. Then, in the second phase, the aggregated data is sent to the 6G-enabled NFV control plane to leverage resource allocation to connected autonomous smart vehicles (CASVs) through edge nodes via service container operations. In the third phase, management plane operations are designed that includes registration and auction smart contracts (SC) for connected autonomous vehicle owner (CAVO) and CASVs over the BC with public/private pairs fetched from interplanetary file systems (IPFS). The proposed scheme is compared against existing NFV schemes like distant, edge, and SDN-based edge control. At 20 CASVs, 6Blocks achieves an edge-service latency of 0.05ms against 0.76ms, 0.27, and 0.15ms for cloud, edge, and SDN-edge schemes, respectively, with high connection density of 107 nodes, at maximum utilized IPFS bandwidth of 0.2 Mbps. Then, we validate the trust of our model through the automated validation of the internet security protocol and applications (AVISPA) tool and modeled the vehicle and sensor nodes. The obtained results show the efficacy of the proposed scheme against existing state-of-the-art approaches with respect to parameters such as network, security, transaction costs, and auction.