Privacy Preserving Blockchain Enabled Metaheuristic Clustering Protocol for Vehicular Adhoc Networks

Abstract

Vehicular adhoc networks (VANET) are commonly employed for prompt and efficient communication among vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) to enhance the road safety and efficacy of traffic flow. Owing to the mobile nature of the vehicles and wireless links, the VANET is susceptible to malicious nodes which can get access as to network and perform medium access control (MAC) layer threat. Therefore, it is needed to design effective security based solutions with clustering process for energy efficient and secure VANET. In this aspect, this paper presents a novel chicken swarm optimization based clustering with blockchain technology (CSOC-BT) for privacy preserving VANET. The goal of the CSOC-BT technique is to cluster the vehicles using the CSO algorithm and choose cluster heads (CHs) proficiently in such a way that the load gets balanced throughout the network. The CSOC-BT technique derives a fitness function involving multiple input parameters to select CHs and organize clusters. In addition, blockchain technology is applied to perform secure inter-cluster and intra-cluster communication in the network. To ensure the improved security and energy efficient performance of the CSOC-BT technique, a wide range of simulations take place under the existence of attacks. The experimental results demonstrated the enhanced performance of the CSOC-BT technique over the recent state of art approaches interms of different measures.