A blockchain-based Fog-oriented lightweight framework for smart public vehicular transportation systems

Rapid urbanization is putting a strain on the transport systems of cities worldwide. The effects of this trend include prolonged traffic jams and increasing environmental pollution from rising emissions. As city planning requires innovative ways of dealing with the rapid urbanization trend, technological solutions were proposed such as cloud computing, smart vehicles, and Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET). In this paper, we take advantage of next-generation network technologies to propose a responsive and lightweight framework for smart transportation system which employs blockchain for authentication using fog computing’s improvement over cloud computing for distributed applications to provide an efficient and secure transportation system. We take into account the future technologies of 5G and Beyond 5G (B5G) and argue that the integration of B5G technologies, federated learning, blockchain, and edge computing provides the perfect platform necessary for a smart transportation system The evaluation of the proposed framework is done by comparing it to the current cloud-based approach in iFogSim, a popular simulation tool for fog computing research. The evaluation of blockchain-based authentication was done using a customized implementation of blockchain executed in an experimental setup. The simulation results showed that the proposed framework provides superior performance in terms of security, latency, and energy consumption of the system.