MOTIVE: Micropayments for trusted vehicular services

Increasingly, connected cars are becoming a decentralized data platform. With greater autonomy, they have growing needs for computation and perceiving the world around them through sensors. While todays generation of vehicles carry all the necessary sensor data and computation on board, we envision a future where vehicles can cooperate to increase their perception of the world beyond their immediate view, resulting in greater safety, coordination and more comfortable experience for their human occupants. In order for vehicles to obtain data, compute and other services from other vehicles or road side infrastructure, it is important to be able to make micro payments for those services and for the services to run seamlessly despite the challenges posed by mobility and ephemeral interactions with a dynamic set of neighboring devices. We present MOTIVE, a trusted and decentralized framework that allows vehicles to make peer to peer micropayments for data, compute and other services obtained from other vehicles or road side infrastructure within radio range. The framework utilizes distributed ledger technologies including smart contracts to enable autonomous operation and trusted interactions between vehicles and nearby entities

1 Optimizing Content Dissemination in Vehicular Networks with Radio Heterogeneity

Abstract—Disseminating shared information to many vehicles could incur significant access fees if it relies only on unicast cellular communications. We consider the problem of efficient content dissemination over a vehicular network, in which vehicles are equipped with two kinds of radios: a high-cost low-bandwidth, long-range cellular radio, and a free high-bandwidth short-range radio. We formulate and solve an optimization problem to maximize content dissemination from the infrastructure to vehicles within a predetermined deadline while minimizing the cost associated with communicating over the cellular connection. We examine numerically the tradeoffs between cost, delay and system utility in the optimum regime. We find that, in the optimum regime, (a) system utility is more sensitive to the cost budget when the allowed delay for the dissemination is not large, (b) the system requires relatively smaller cost budget as more vehicles participate and more delay is allowed, (c) when the cost is very important, it is better not to spread the content if it needs small delay. We also develop a polynomial-time algorithm to obtain the optimal discrete solution needed in practice. Finally, we verify our analysis using real GPS traces of 632 taxis in Beijing, China.