A Design of Internet of Vehicles System Incorporating Lightweight Roadside Units and Blockchain Strategy

The accelerated advancement and ubiquitous adoption of smart vehicles, coupled with the Internet of Things (IoT), has propelled the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) to prominence as a pivotal and expansive area of research within the IoT sphere. An important challenge in IoV design lies in the efficient execution of data storage and sharing mechanisms. The successful implementation of blockchain technology across various disciplines has sparked intrigue amongst researchers to unearth its potential applicability within the IoV context. In the related works, Blockchain-based IoV systems are usually composed of three layers: the vehicle layer, the roadside units (RSUs) layer, and the blockchain or cloud layer. The RSUs layer is often required to perform numerous tasks throughout the system. Stability during rush hours is worth considering. RSUs need to receive a lot of data during rush hours and may also undertake data computing tasks. Based on the characteristics of distributed ledges, the issue of substantial storage overhead looms as a complex problem with the escalating size of the block list. Although some solutions are being proposed, such as fragmented ledger, there are still security concerns. Data security cannot be guaranteed while reducing storage overhead. To combat the stability and cost concerns associated with Roadside Units (RSUs), we delegate the majority of RSU functionalities to other layers of the system. Further, we incorporate a secure blockchain strategy - deploying an outer and inner blockchain to fortify the security and resilience of the overall blockchain network. Based on the autonomous execution characteristics of smart contracts, we try to use smart contracts for data transmission. We use Solidity to write the smart contract and test it on the Remix IDE with the aim of testing the smart contract's operability in terms of data transmission. We scrutinise the data transmission process via smart contracts, and the empirical results corroborate the effectiveness of our uniquely designed process.