Internet of Vehicles Data Sharing Scheme via Blockchain Sharding

Efficient and secure data sharing is crucial for the profound application of the intelligent Internet of vehicles, where achieving trusted data sharing between mutually untrusting vehicles has become a major focus of current research. With the characteristics of tamper resistance and traceability, blockchain has emerged as a primary approach to support data circulation in the intelligent Internet of vehicles. Existing blockchain-based data-sharing solutions for the Internet of vehicles suffer from low throughput and security vulnerabilities. In this paper, the blockchain sharding approach was introduced, where a machine learning-based sharding algorithm was utilized to partition road side unit (RSU) with geographical proximity into the same shard and iteratively optimize data-sharing loads within individual shards. This algorithm reduces intra-shard communication latency and subsequently improves throughput while balancing the data-sharing loads among different shards. To prevent bribery attacks within a single shard, a reputation-based intra-shard consensus protocol and the supervisor mechanism were proposed. The proposed protocol involves the election of RSUs with high reputation to participate in the intra-shard consensus process and dynamically calculates the latest reputation of RSUs. High-reputation RSUs are designated supervisors and regularly verify the legitimacy of blocks generated in different shards. Performance evaluation and security analysis demonstrate the scheme enhances the efficiency and security of data sharing in the intelligent Internet of vehicles.