A Reputation-Based Leader Election Scheme for Opportunistic Autonomous Vehicle Platoon

Abstract

As an emerging concept in the intelligent transportation system (ITS), Opportunistic Autonomous Vehicle Platoon (OAVP) enables autonomous vehicles to self-organize a temporary platoon and travel together. Whereas, electing the platoon leader is a crucial issue to be solved in this scenario. The platoon leader not only suffers from more wind resistance but also spends more computation resources in dealing with tremendous information obtained from the surrounding environment. Hence, vehicles tend to be a follower rather than a leader. In this paper, we propose a reputation-based leader election system for OAVP named RLE, which contains two sub-systems: leader election and incentive mechanism. In the former one, a reputation-based election scheme is first constructed to elect a relatively trustful leader according to the reputation value recorded on the blockchain. The proposed scheme integrates previous experience with recommendations from other members. In the second sub-system, an incentive mechanism is designed to stimulate platoon members to participate actively in the process of election, which is based on the recorded real-time fuel economy among vehicles participating in a platoon. Security analysis shows that the system is sufficient to deal with potential security threats. Experimental results based on the simulated platform demonstrate the practicality and feasibility of our solution.