SLIM: Stateless-Based Lightweight Sharding Mechanism for Secure Data Interchange in Blockchain-Enabled Internet of Vehicles

The emergence of Blockchain-enabled Internet of Vehicles stands as a critical method for secure data exchange between vehicles and traffic infrastructures. Yet, significant challenges persist, particularly in terms of limited fault tolerance and constraints associated with storage and computational resources. In this study, we introduce the Stateless-based Lightweight Sharding Mechanism (SLIM) for enhanced secure data exchange. This mechanism is built on three key strategies: 1) SLIM incorporates a robust sharding protocol which includes identity establishment and verification, shard formation, and intra-shard consensus to mitigate the impact of Byzantine nodes within each shard. This protocol is designed to reduce the influence of malicious nodes in each shard, thereby improving fault tolerance and security. 2) To address storage challenges, we employ a stateless verification algorithm to allow service nodes in the Internet of Vehicles to authenticate vehicular data transactions without the need to store the entire historical blockchain data. 3) SLIM also integrates a Stackelberg game model for efficient resource distribution in collaborative networks. By offloading the mining process and data storage to the cloud and allowing roadside units to adjust their storage and computing strategies through the game model, the computing resource requirement of roadside units is thus substantially reduced, leading to optimized revenue generation. The security effectiveness of SLIM is theoretically proven. The simulations and experimental results demonstrate that SLIM's block size is significantly smaller (66.9 times less) than Ethereum's, and its block verification time is 67% faster compared to conventional stateless blockchains.