Blockchain and Deep Reinforcement Learning Empowered Spatial Crowdsourcing in Software-Defined Internet of Vehicles

Abstract

Owing to its benefits such as flexibility, scalability, and interoperability, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has been incorporated into Internet of Vehicles (IoV) to cope with the increasing demands of vehicular applications. The integration of SDN and IoV, namely SDN-IoV, can enrich many new applications for intelligent transportation such as traffic monitoring, smart navigation, and self-driving. The spatial crowdsourcing technology has been adopted as an effective data collection and processing method that is the premise of various SDN-IoV applications. However, as huge amounts of data are generated in spatial crowdsourcing services, the data privacy and security has become a key challenge for SDN-IoV. To overcome abovementioned challenge, a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Blockchain empowered Spatial Crowdsourcing System (DB-SCS) is proposed. In DB-SCS, we design an improved multi-blockchain structure and a blockchain-based hierarchical task management method, which divide the spatial tasks into different categories according to the privacy requirements and the areas of the task and then decompose different categories of tasks and task receivers into sub-blockchains. While guaranteeing the data privacy, DB-SCS can also enhance the spatial crowdsourcing performance by using the proposed DRL-based management strategy to dynamically select the consensus algorithm, block size, and block generation rule. Extensive simulation experiments demonstrate that the DB-SCS can obtain high throughput, low overhead, and data privacy under various SDN-IoV scenarios.