Mid Sweden University

The staggering growth of the number of vehicles worldwide has become a critical challenge resulting in tragic incidents, environment pollution, congestion, etc. Therefore, one of the promising approaches is to design a smart vehicular system as it is beneficial to drive safely. Present vehicular system lacks data reliability, security, and easy deployment. Motivated by these issues, this paper addresses a drone-enabled intelligent vehicular system, which is secure, easy to deploy and reliable in quality. Nevertheless, an increase in the number of operating drones in the communication networks makes them more vulnerable towards the cyber-attacks, which can completely sabotage the communication infrastructure. To tackle these problems, we propose a blockchain-based registration and authentication system for the entities such as drones, smart vehicles (SVs) and roadside units (RSUs). This paper is mainly focused on the blockchain-based secure system design and the optimal placement of drones to improve the spectral efficiency of the overall network. In particular, we investigate the association of RSUs with the drones by considering multiple communication-related factors such as available bandwidth, maximum number of links a drone can support, and backhaul limitations. We show that the proposed model can easily be overlaid on the current vehicular network reaping benefits of secure and reliable communications. © 2000-2011 IEEE.