An Efficient Data Sharing Scheme for Privacy Protection Based on Blockchain and Edge Intelligence in 6G-VANET

With the substantial increase in the number of smart cars, vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), where data can be shared between vehicles to enrich existing vehicle services and improve driving safety, is gaining more and more attention, thus creating a more efficient intelligent transportation system. Moreover, the in-depth research and development of 6G and AI technology further strengthen the interconnection of various entities in VANET and can realize edge intelligence, which fundamentally enhances the efficiency of data sharing. However, reliable transmission and secure storage of data have always been a great challenge in data sharing. Although some schemes store shared data in the blockchain, most of the consensus mechanisms they use employ full nodes to verify signature information and timestamps, which cannot effectively judge the reliability of the shared data itself. Some other schemes use scoring mechanisms to evaluate data uploaded by vehicles, but these methods can be affected by network hardware failures and cannot effectively detect duplicate data. In addition, participants’ privacy may also be disclosed in the process of data sharing, such as participants’ location and identity information. Therefore, to address the above problems, this paper proposes a data sharing scheme in 6G-VANET, which can not only ensure the reliability and security of shared data but also protect the privacy of participants. Firstly, a consortium chain is adopted to realize the secure storage of shared data in 6G-VANET, which meets the requirements of tamper-proof and traceability of data. Secondly, a voting consensus mechanism is designed in combination with smart contract to ensure the reliability of data. Thirdly, the trained word2vec natural language processing model is deployed to edge nodes to realize edge intelligence, effectively eliminate the duplicate shared data, and enhance storage efficiency. Finally, a participant privacy protection mechanism is designed using the Private Set Intersection (PSI) protocol, and a secure and efficient data sharing scheme is finally realized. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated by security analysis and experimental evaluation. The experimental results show that the time and space overhead of blockchain can meet the practical requirements, and the proposed PSI protocol of large-scale vehicles can be completed in a short time.