Blockchain-Based Trustworthiness in Cross-Border Data Exchange in 5G-Powered Intelligent Connected Vehicles

Emerging applications, such as Smart Grid (SG), UAV (drone)-based delivery (logistics) involve multiple networks, including 5G-powered intelligent UAVs (drones), ground intelligent Internet-connected vehicles (IIoCVs), and Edge-assisted Internet of Things (IoT). Data exchange in these cross-border network applications faces significant challenges due to cyberattacks and faults in the network. This leads to untrustworthy situations in network automation regarding secret data access, data sensitivity, wrong regional status, and false direction. In this paper, we propose bTrust design, a blockchain-based trustworthy data exchange framework to improve these situations in network automation. The framework development consists of five procedures regarding the data provider and data requester's trustworthiness. We adopt cloud computing to cover different terrain regions with Edge-computing units (ECUs, deployed at the IIoCVs), where one of the ECUs functions as the Edge server covering each region. When a drone claims that there is an untrustworthy action, such as compromised or incorrect data transmission against the IIoCV, the cloud authenticates the claims by inspecting the blockchain. It penalizes the compromised IIoCV if the claim is correct. Otherwise, the cloud can punish the drone itself (e.g., by reducing the trustworthiness score). As a result, bTrust enhances cross-regional data exchange trustworthiness using the blockchain that depends on a reduced trust assumption.