Blockchain-Enabled Online Traffic Congestion Duration Prediction in Cognitive Internet of Vehicles

The real-time intelligent perception and prediction of traffic situation can assist connected automated vehicles (CAVs) in path planning and reduce traffic congestion in Cognitive Internet of Vehicles (CIoVs). The centralized traffic congestion prediction solutions generally fail to adapt to the dynamic traffic environment and lead to significant communication overheads. Blockchain technology has attracted great attention in the information sharing of vehicular networks for its advantages in decentralization, transparency, traceability, and tamper-proof capability. However, due to the bottlenecks, such as high computational cost, current blockchains are incapable actuate on efficient online traffic situational cognition and prediction for CIoVs. Motivated by this, we propose a blockchain-enabled cognitive segments sharing framework for online multistep congestion duration prediction. We design a cognitive model of traffic situation based on anomaly detection and filtering mechanism to guarantee the accuracy of the cognitive segments before being packaged into the block. Furthermore, to improve the consensus efficiency, we design a credit evaluation mechanism and propose a credit-based delegated Byzantine fault tolerance (CDBFT) algorithm. Finally, we propose an online multistep prediction algorithm based on long short-term memory (LSTM) to predict future traffic congestion duration. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms achieve shorter consensus latency and higher predictive accuracy than the existing algorithms.