Jul 2026· ACM Transactions on Internet Technology· Vol 26, pp. 1 - 27· 0 citations· 29 references
TL;DR
A blockchain-based dynamically adaptive restructuring framework that enables real-time IoV cluster restructuring by splitting overloaded IoVs to reduce communication overhead, or merging nearby IoVs to optimize resource utilization, offering a proactive, adaptive security paradigm for intelligent transportation frameworks.
Abstract
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) enhances road safety and supports autonomous driving through real-time communication, but current methods face key challenges: rigid resource allocation due to static architectures, communication failures in low-signal areas from infrastructure reliance, and passive defense mechanisms struggle to counter coordinated attacks, while high-latency encryption algorithms further compromise framework real-time performance. To address this, we propose a blockchain-based dynamically adaptive restructuring framework. It enables real-time IoV cluster restructuring by splitting overloaded IoVs to reduce communication overhead, or merging nearby IoVs to optimize resource utilization. In infrastructure-sparse zones, vehicles establish temporary multi-hop communication links based on relative mobility to ensure continuous connectivity. A multi-layered security mechanism integrates physical validation, event verification, and majority voting, achieving over 95% resistance to data tampering. Compared to Raft, PoS, and PBFT, our framework improves consensus speed by 27.06%–38.56%, and reduces transaction latency by 7%–35%, 15%–54%, and 27%–66%, respectively. It also maintains high robustness under dense traffic, high mobility, and weak signals, offering a proactive, adaptive security paradigm for intelligent transportation frameworks.
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) enhances transportation through connectivity and intelligence. However, this integration exposes IoV systems to various cyber threats, such as data breaches, hacking, vehicle control manipulation, and vehicle identity theft, which must be addressed to ensure system security. This study tackles security, scalability, and efficiency issues in the IoV framework by implementing a decentralized, blockchain-based authentication framework. It addresses cryptographic vulnerabilities, reduces computational and communication costs, and improves real-time performance. The framework also reduces latency and communication overhead, ensuring secure connectivity in high-traffic IoV scenarios. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the techniques deployed, including secure mapping, distributed verification, verified connectivity, and decentralized validation. The results of performance evaluations demonstrate that the proposed framework has improved computing efficiency, high communication effectiveness, and reduced overall delay. The system is also shown to be adaptable to various node densities and communication conditions. The experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves a computation cost of 4.29 ms, representing a 48.19% improvement over the best-performing existing methods. Similarly, the total communication cost of the framework is 176 ms, showing reductions of 65.22%, 51.38%, 76.56%, and 74.04% compared to previous approaches. Lastly, a security analysis confirms that the framework establishes a solid security foundation, and the results of a comparative analysis indicate its potential to strengthen the security of IoV networks.
Balasubramani Subbiyan, Bhabendu Kumar Mohanta, Renjith Prabhavathi Neelakandan et al.· IEEE Open Journal of Intelli...· 0 citations
: Internet of Vehicles (IoV) enable enable communication between vehicles and infrastructure to improve road safety and traffic efficiency. However, authenticating vehicles across different administrative domains remains a challenge. This work proposes a blockchain-based authentication framework that enables secure cross-domain communication between vehicles. The proposed architecture combines Ethereum smart contracts with a Trusted Authority (TA) and Key Generation Center (KGC) to maintain decentralized domain trust while allowing efficient local authentication. A prototype system was implemented using a WiFi Router as the Road Side Unit (RSU) for network connectivity, a Raspberry Pi 5 hosting the TA and KGC servers, ESP32 micro-controllers as vehicle nodes, and a local Ethereum blockchain using Hardhat. Experiments were conducted with vehicle counts ranging from 100 to 500 and domain counts from 2 to 10. The system maintained a packet delivery ratio of 100% across all experiments while achieving average latency between 49 ms and 206 ms and throughput between 391 and 723 requests per second. The results demonstrate that blockchain-assisted authentication can be integrated into IoV systems without significant performance degradation.
Priya Jyotiyana, J. Kar· Proceedings of the 23rd Inte...· 0 citations
Simulation results show that compared with standard PBFT, Q-PBFT, and APBFT, H-PBFT exhibits significant advantages in consensus latency, throughput, and view switching recovery time, and maintains high system robustness even in complex network environments with malicious nodes.
Zhenhua Wang, Jiangang Hu, Xinmeng Wang et al.· Future Internet· 0 citations
Elastic Proof-of-Location Byzantine Fault Tolerance is proposed, a privacy-preserving and location-aware blockchain consensus framework for IoT systems that reduces communication overhead and improves consensus efficiency compared with conventional PBFT-based approaches while strengthening resilience against location-based and identity-based attacks.
Yunus Kareem, D. Djenouri, Essam Ghadafi· Future Internet· 0 citations
Internet of Vehicle (IoV) uses heterogeneous access technologies to link automobiles and their surroundings. Effective methods are essential for safeguarding data confidentiality and privacy during communication among the roadside unit (RSU), the control room, and vehicles. Many vehicle-to-infrastructure authentication-based approaches have been developed to secure the IoV environment. However, efficiency and security are challenged by instability, decentralization, and transaction-tracking features. To resolve this, a secure, lightweight, and scalable communication protocol was developed for a 5G-enabled SDN-IoV environment. Efficient block verification is achieved through the Joint-Graph Delegated Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (JtGr-DPBFT) mechanism, in which validators create subgraphs to reduce communication overhead. JtGr-DPBFT is combined with an Improved Gossip Algorithm (IGA) to minimize message redundancy and optimize bandwidth utilization. Moreover, a lightweight hierarchical authentication mechanism, assisted by a Merkle Tree with Boneh-Lynn-Shacham (HAMT-BLS) signatures, enables compact block verification and minimizes computational and communication costs. The proposed model achieves tamper-proof, efficient, and scalable block verification by incorporating hierarchical authentication with consensus optimization. This approach is simulated in the NS3 tool, and performance is evaluated in terms of propagation delay, transaction confirmation latency, throughput, communication cost, and network delay. Thus, secure and tamper-proof communication is developed to ensure integrity, trust, and dependability in the SDN-enabled IoV environment.
R. J. Lawande, Sudhir Lande, M. Lande· Future Technology· 0 citations
Decentralized Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture (DCSMA) is a new cybersecurity architecture designed to secure distributed networks, particularly Internet of Things (IoT) environments. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on centralized control or isolated security silos, it leverages blockchain technology to enable fully decentralized security management, eliminating single points of failure and improving coordination among security components. In this paper, a practical implementation of DCSMA is presented and evaluated in an Internet of Vehicles (IoV) environment. The system is developed using a hybrid simulation framework that combines Carla for IoV scenarios and Ganache for blockchain emulation. It integrates key technologies, including Decentralized Identity (DID), Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC), smart contracts, and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), to support secure communication and distributed policy enforcement. The proposed system is evaluated through multiple case studies covering data protection, communication and policy enforcement, and threat detection. Performance is analyzed using metrics such as latency, memory consumption, scalability, throughput, and transaction success rate, in addition to machine learning-based anomaly detection. The results demonstrate that the proposed implementation achieves efficient decentralized security with low overhead and effective threat detection, highlighting its suitability as a scalable and resilient cybersecurity solution for IoV and distributed IoT systems.