Cooperative driving is an emerging paradigm to enhance the safety and efficiency of autonomous vehicles. To ensure successful cooperation, road users must reach a consensus for making collective decisions, while recording vehicular data to analyze and address failures related to such agreements. This data has the potential to provide valuable insights into various vehicular events, while also potentially improving accountability measures. Furthermore, vehicles may benefit from the ability to negotiate and trade services among themselves, adding value to the cooperative driving framework. However, the majority of proposed systems aiming to ensure data security, consensus, or service trading, lack efficient and thoroughly validated mechanisms that consider the distinctive characteristics of vehicular networks. These limitations are amplified by a dependency on the centralized support provided by the infrastructure. Furthermore, corresponding mechanisms must diligently address security concerns, especially regarding potential malicious or misbehaving nodes, while also considering inherent constraints of the wireless medium. We introduce the Verifiable Event Extension (VEE), an applicational extension designed for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) messages. The VEE operates seamlessly with any existing standardized vehicular communications protocol, addressing crucial aspects of data security, consensus, and trading with minimal overhead. To achieve this, we employ blockchain techniques, Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) consensus protocols, and cryptocurrency-based mechanics. To assess our proposal's feasibility and lightweight nature, we employed a hardware-in-the-loop setup for analysis. Experimental results demonstrate the viability and efficiency of the VEE extension in overcoming the challenges posed by the distributed and opportunistic nature of wireless vehicular communications.

翻译：协作驾驶是一种新兴范式，旨在提升自动驾驶车辆的安全性与效率。为确保成功协作，道路参与者必须达成共识以做出集体决策，同时记录车辆数据以分析与此类协议相关的故障。这些数据不仅能提供关于各类车辆事件的宝贵见解，还有可能增强问责机制。此外，车辆可能通过彼此协商与交易服务获益，从而为协作驾驶框架增添价值。然而，现有大多数旨在确保数据安全、共识或服务交易的系统缺乏高效且经过充分验证的机制，未能充分考虑车联网的独特特性。这些局限性因依赖于基础设施提供的集中式支持而被进一步放大。此外，相关机制必须审慎应对安全问题，尤其是针对潜在的恶意或异常节点，同时还需考虑无线介质的固有约束。我们提出了可验证事件扩展（VEE），这是一种专为智能交通系统（ITS）消息设计的应用层扩展。VEE可与任何现有标准化车联网通信协议无缝协作，以最小化开销解决数据安全、共识与交易等关键问题。为此，我们采用了区块链技术、拜占庭容错（BFT）共识协议以及基于加密货币的机制。为了评估本方案的可行性及轻量级特性，我们采用了硬件在环（HIL）测试平台进行分析。实验结果表明，VEE扩展在应对无线车联网通信的分布式与机会性特征所带来的挑战方面具有可行性与高效性。