Truck Platooning Aided Secure Publish/Subscribe System Based on Smart Contract in Autonomous Vehicular Networks

The publish/subscribe system over the autonomous vehicular networks (AVNs) enables the content providers to obtain more profits from a flexible notification system. However, few of current works focus on flexible brokers suitable for AVNs. In this paper, we propose a truck platoon aided secure publish/subscribe system based on smart contract in AVNs. Firstly, the truck platoons are utilized to be the brokers of the publish/subscribe system to realize a more efficient and secure publish/subscribe system. Secondly, a vehicular blockchain is established for the publish/subscribe system to record the transactions between brokers and publishers/subscribers to guarantee the complete and safe implementation of the smart contracts. Next, a contract based on the principal-agent problem is designed between the publisher and broker to maximize their utilities and stimulate the broker to be more active in the contents subscribing service. Furthermore, a smart contract is also designed between the subscriber and broker by the cloud server to achieve higher utilities and match an appropriate broker for the subscriber by considering its type. Finally, we carry out extensive numerical results to evaluate the performances of the proposed contracts, while the results also demonstrate that the proposal outperforms the conventional schemes.