The vehicular Internet of Things (IoT) comprises enabling technologies for a large number of important applications including collaborative autonomous driving and advanced transportation systems. Due to the mobility of vehicles, strict application requirements, and limited communication resources, the conventional centralized control fails to provide sufficient quality of service for connected vehicles, so a decentralized approach is required in the vicinity to satisfy the requirements of delay-sensitive and mission-critical applications. A decentralized system is also more resistant to the single point of failure problem and malicious attacks. Blockchain technology has been attracting great interest due to its capability of achieving a decentralized, transparent, and tamper-resistant system. There are many studies focusing on the use of blockchain in managing data and transactions in vehicular environments. However, the application of blockchain in vehicular environments also faces some technical challenges. In this paper, we first explain the fundamentals of blockchain and vehicular IoT. Then, we conduct a literature review on the existing research efforts of the blockchain for vehicular IoT by discussing the research problems and technical issues. After that, we point out some future research issues considering the characteristics of both blockchain and vehicular IoT.

With the development of advanced information and communication technology, the traditional centralized service model alone no longer meets the increasing demand of data exchange in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). While Internet of Vehicles (IoV) technology has been introduced to achieve more advanced ITS, there are still some unsettled issues such as flexibility and fault tolerance. The conventional centralized approach for ITS is vulnerable to the single point of failure, and lack of flexibility due to its dependence on a trusted third party (TTP). The emergence of blockchain technology provides a potential direction to address these problems. However, due to varying vehicle densities, it is challenging to select the best blockchain parameters to satisfy the application requirements. In this paper, we propose a multi-channel blockchain scheme that can use the best parameters in accordance with the vehicle density. The proposed scheme first defines multiple blockchain channels where each channel is optimized for a certain vehicle density level. Then, the system selects the best channel according to the vehicle density, and the application requirements on the transaction throughput and latency. We use extensive simulations to show that the proposed blockchain scheme achieves a significantly better performance as compared with existing baselines.INDEX TERMS Blockchain, IoV, hyperledger fabric, channel management.

With the development of advanced information and communication technology, the traditional centralized cloud architecture cannot satisfy the exploding demand for data exchange in Internet of Vehicle (IoV) systems. Moreover, the traditional centralized architecture of the vehicular network has the potential risk of a single point of failure and lacks autonomy since the system highly relies on a trusted third party (TTP) to provide identity management. Fortunately, the emergence of blockchain technology provides a potential direction to address these problems. However, there are still some problems existing in the construction of an efficient blockchain system in IoV systems, such as the dynamic network topology and limited resources. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical resource scheduling scheme for blockchain-enabled IoV systems that improves the performance of the blockchain-enabled IoV system by efficiently allocating computational resources. The superiority of the proposed method is fully demonstrated by comparing it with existing baseline methods.

In order to satisfy new normal life styles in the post-COVID-19 era, an efficient information and communication technology (ICT) framework is required to collect, process, and utilize data for the purpose of satisfying increasing user demand in communications and computing while providing a functionality of responding quickly to pandemic. We propose an ICT framework that is capable to support diverse application requirements based on ambient communication, resilient computing, and agile control technologies. Computer simulations are conducted to evaluate the fundamental functionalities of the proposed framework by using a case study where data are exchanged and processed among different network entities in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) empowered vehicular environments. The simulation results show that the proposed approach can outperform existing baselines in various conditions.

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