Lightweight Blockchain Consensus Protocols for Vehicular Social Networks

This paper presents lightweight blockchain consensus protocols that are specifically designed for vehicular social networks, or other networks that resemble them. They are lightweight in the sense that no puzzles are required to be solved and no cryptocurrency systems are required to be built beforehand. Various scenarios are considered, including whether the communication is reliable and whether the vehicle grouping is static. Although we break our solution of the consensus problem into private chain and public chain, we provide a scheme to smoothly bridge between them. Theoretical analysis is provided to guarantee the algorithms to succeed with high probability, before experiments are conducted to verify the algorithms and compare their theoretical performance versus simulation performance, namely worst-case performance versus average performance.