Challenges and solutions in autonomous driving: A blockchain approach

The autonomous driving era is coming with tremendous potential to revolutionize transportation systems with improved safety, comfort, and intelligence on the road. Integrating connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) and rising social networking, autonomous vehicular social networks (AVSNs) can facilitate the data dissemination in safety-critical and entertainment-related applications for autonomous driving. However, with time-varying, delay-constrained, and location-dependent characteristics in autonomous driving, it faces great challenges to incentivize CAVs to disseminate massive content in AVSNs. Meanwhile, attackers may not only disseminate fake information to confuse the network, but also pose security vulnerabilities and privacy issues for CAVs. In this article, we investigate secure and incentive content delivery in AVSNs based on the advanced blockchain. Specifically, we first present a blockchain-enabled AVSN framework to safeguard content delivery. Then, we investigate the task-based and credit-based reputation models to evaluate the trustworthiness of CAVs and RSUs, respectively. The reputation increase and task reward are explored as incentives for CAVs delivering reliable content. In addition, a novel proof of reputation consensus protocol is devised to efficiently reach consensus in blockchain-enabled AVSNs while motivating RSUs to behave honestly. Experimental results indicate that the proposed framework outperforms the existing approaches, delivering vehicular content more reliably and securely. Finally, future research directions in this emerging area are discussed.