A Blockchain-Empowered Platoon Communication Scheme for Vehicular Safety Applications

The integration of blockchain in vehicular networks is becoming the backbone for securing intelligent and autonomous vehicles. Besides security, vehicles are also able to enhance their communication performances by expanding the services with blockchain technology. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain-empowered platoon communication scheme for vehicular safety applications. Decentralized vehicles first form into a platoon assisted by a pre-established blockchain-based security system. The platoon communication is then utilized to update the resource scheduling scheme enabled by the blockchain on the attending vehicles. In addition, to reduce the communication overhead, we further propose an adaptive block generation period (ABGP) algorithm based on the estimated resource occupancy percentage. Monte Carlo simulation is employed to compare the results between the proposed scheme and the semi-persistent scheduling (SPS) scheme specified by the current standard. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the SPS scheme by decreasing the collision probability at least 40% while reducing the average scheduling delay by at least 30%.