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

TL;DR

GOLIATH is a blockchain-based decentralized framework for real-time traffic data collection in ITS, enhancing trust and robustness by leveraging vehicle-to-vehicle sharing and a novel consensus mechanism.

Contribution

It introduces a decentralized, blockchain-enabled system for traffic data collection that improves trustworthiness and resilience over traditional centralized solutions.

Findings

Demonstrates feasibility in vehicle positioning and traffic management

Shows robustness against adversarial attacks in simulations

Validates the system's safety and reliability properties

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.