An integrated framework for blockchain inspired fog communications and computing in internet of vehicles

In this paper, the novel fog communications and computing paradigm is addressed by presenting an integrated system architecture, that is applied to achieve a full context awareness for vehicular networks and, consequently, to react on traffic anomalous conditions. In particular, we propose to adopt a specific co-designed approach involving application and networks layers. For the latter one, as no infrastructure usually exists, effective routing protocols are needed to guarantee a certain level of reliability of the information collected from individual vehicles. As a consequence, we investigated classical epidemic flooding based, network coding inspired and chord protocols. Besides, we resort to blockchain principle to design a distributed consensus sensing application. The system has been tested by resorting to OMNeT++ framework for its modularity, high fidelity and flexibility. Performance analysis has been conducted over realistic scenarios in terms of consensus making overhead, latency and scalability, pointing out the better trade-off allowing the overlay P2P network formation and the complete context awareness achieved by the vehicles community.