RSU Cluster Deployment and Collaboration Storage of IoV Based Blockchain

The Internet of Vehicles is increasingly becoming an indispensable platform to make interactions among vehicles, humans, and roadside infrastructures, and it is continuing to evolve with improvements on its application scenarios and service robustness. Academia and industry have also been concerned with the security issue of Internet of Vehicles (IoV). The Blockchain technology provides a new solution to improve security of the IoV, and it has drawn increased attention. Blockchain technology deals with the network model, identity authentication, trust management, and access control. However, there are insufficient studies on strategy of nodes deployment in the existing BIoV (Blockchain-based IoV). Based on the principle of partition, this paper studies the Blockchain-based IoV model in which the vehicle network system consists of vehicles and Road Side Unit (RSU) nodes. The Blockchain network is formed by the RSU nodes. By optimizing the LEACH algorithm, we partition RSUs and select cluster heads in BIoV, which has good scalability while maintaining a reasonable scale of Blockchain. Simulation results indicated that the improved-LEACH algorithm (I-LEACH) is more effective than the LEACH, DEEC, and the improved-DEEC algorithms (I-DEEC) with respect to the network life cycle and data transmission. Additionally, in order to reduce dependence of the storage resources from BIoV, we designed an intra-cluster collaborative storage scheme by adopting three algorithms for comparison—the genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, and the model quantum genetic algorithm (QGA). It revealed that the intra-cluster collaborative storage scheme is effective to ease the bottleneck of storage space demanded in BIoV, and verified by the simulation experiments.