Secure and Blockchain-Based Emergency Driven Message Protocol for 5G Enabled Vehicular Edge Computing

• Main Authors: Lewis Nkenyereye, Bayu Adhi Tama, Muhammad K. Shahzad, Yoon-Ho Choi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019-12-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: vehicle edge computing; 5g cellular networks; blockchain; multi-receiver signcryption; security; privacy
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/1/154

Basic safety message (BSM) are messages that contain core elements of a vehicle such as vehicle’s size, position, speed, acceleration and others. BSM are lightweight messages that can be regularly broadcast by the vehicles to enable a variety of applications. On the other hand, event-driven message (EDM) are messages generated at the time of occurrence such as accidents or roads sliding and can contain much more heavy elements including pictures, audio or videos. Security, architecture and communication solutions for BSM use cases have been largely documented on in the literature contrary to EDM due to several concerns such as the variant size of EDM, the appropriate architecture along with latency, privacy and security. In this paper, we propose a secure and blockchain based EDM protocol for 5G enabled vehicular edge computing. To offer scalability and latency for the proposed scenario, we adopt a 5G cellular architecture due to its projected features compared to 4G tong-term evaluation (LTE) for vehicular communications. We consider edge computing to provide local processing of EDM that can improve the response time of public agencies (ambulances or rescue teams) that may intervene to the scene. We make use of lightweight multi-receiver signcryption scheme without pairing that offers low time consuming operations, security, privacy and access control. EDM records need to be kept into a distributed system which can guarantee reliability and auditability of EDM. To achieve this, we construct a private blockchain based on the edge nodes to store EDM records. The performance analysis of the proposed protocol confirms its efficiency.