Decentralized and Adaptive Internet of Vehicles: A Blockchain-Based Approach

Abstract

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) enhances road safety and supports autonomous driving through real-time communication, but current methods face key challenges: rigid resource allocation due to static architectures, communication failures in low-signal areas from infrastructure reliance, and passive defense mechanisms struggle to counter coordinated attacks, while high-latency encryption algorithms further compromise framework real-time performance. To address this, we propose a blockchain-based dynamically adaptive restructuring framework. It enables real-time IoV cluster restructuring by splitting overloaded IoVs to reduce communication overhead, or merging nearby IoVs to optimize resource utilization. In infrastructure-sparse zones, vehicles establish temporary multi-hop communication links based on relative mobility to ensure continuous connectivity. A multi-layered security mechanism integrates physical validation, event verification, and majority voting, achieving over 95% resistance to data tampering. Compared to Raft, PoS, and PBFT, our framework improves consensus speed by 27.06%–38.56%, and reduces transaction latency by 7%–35%, 15%–54%, and 27%–66%, respectively. It also maintains high robustness under dense traffic, high mobility, and weak signals, offering a proactive, adaptive security paradigm for intelligent transportation frameworks.