Blockchain‐enhanced trust management for mobile edge computing‐enabled intelligent vehicular collaboration in the 6G era

Abstract

The rapid development and increasing popularity of mobile devices have facilitated the development of computation‐intensive applications and services, but their constrained compute, storage and battery capabilities have also created the requirements for optimized resource provision and service orchestration. Emerging mobile edge computing (MEC) and next‐generation networks (6G) can meet these requirements of mobile devices by migrating complex computing tasks and large volumes of data to edge servers with acceptable latency, thus effectively enhancing the quality of experience (QoE) of mobile users. Intelligent Vehicular Collaboration, as an intelligent mobile application or service in intelligent connected vehicle (ICV) applications, enables precise and effective driving decisions based on a large amount of real‐time traffic information statistics and intelligent analysis of vehicle status to improve the user driving experience and the efficiency of intelligent transportation systems(ITS). However, the openness and dynamics of wireless communications and the high frequency of information interaction of MEC‐enabled intelligent vehicular collaboration services in the 6G era make them highly vulnerable to cyber attacks. How to achieve dynamically trustworthy, secure, and intelligent vehicular collaboration services in the presence of malicious node access and cyber attacks in the 6G MEC‐enabled vehicular network is a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain‐enabled trust management mechanism to address this challenge. First, we design a spatiotemporal‐correlated message credibility assessment method and a dynamic mutual trust evaluation method to obtain accurate ratings for messages and mobile nodes respectively. Based on the above methods, we propose an improved blockchain‐based intelligent trust management mechanism that enables transparent, tamper‐evident, and trustworthy secure intelligent vehicular collaboration services while maintaining stable and efficient system performance. Simulation results show that our suggested solutions can efficiently evaluate the trust level of ICVs and achieve efficient and secure intelligent vehicular collaboration with acceptable communication and computation overheads.