Towards a Blockchain and Software-Defined Vehicular Networks Approaches to Secure Vehicular Social Network

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new framework based on two main concepts: Software-Defined Vehicular Networks (SDVN) and Blockchain to efficiently manage and secure Vehicular Social Network (VSN). Using SDVN makes the network programmable, virtualized, and partitionable, but also it creates a well-known vulnerability named single-point of failure. Hence we propose to introduce a Blockchain paradigm that enables to certify the transactions and provide anonymity of data in distributed way using miners nodes. To this end, we introduce three levels of controllers: Principal controller (PC), Road Side Units (RSU) and miners. The PC has a global overview of the network like network topology. The RSU is an intermediate between the PC and the miners. We select local controllers acting as miners due to safety and performance. In order to select miners, we propose a Distributed Miners Connected Dominating Set algorithm (DM-CDS). The DM-CDS is a distributed algorithm with a single phase that supports dynamic topology. The selection of miners is based on a function called miner-score which depends on trust parameter particularly trust metric and network parameters such as: the connectivity degree, the average link quality indicator and the rank. The performance of the proposed DM-CDS is evaluated using many scenarios with different parameters like trust metric, node density, node mobility and radio range. The obtained results show the importance of the proposed architecture in terms of number of miners (CDS size) and robustness with different scenarios.