PoTC: A Proof of Traffic-Flow Condition Consensus for Secure and Efficient Blockchain in the Internet of Vehicles

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is attracting global attention, with blockchain proposed to ensure data integrity and prevent repudiation. However, traditional blockchain consensus mechanisms face communication and efficiency challenges in IoV environments. Committee-based Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus improves scalability and reduces communication costs but is vulnerable to malicious committee members manipulating the content of the blocks. To address trustworthiness issues, this paper introduces Proof of Traffic-Flow Condition (PoTC) consensus. PoTC uses traffic-data-driven grouping to form committees, enhancing scalability and communication efficiency while maintaining fault tolerance. A robust node assessment model provides precise reliability scores for participants. The security of PoTC is validated through theoretical analysis against two adversary models involving Invalid Voting and Traffic-flow Data Tampering, and extensive experiments demonstrate its efficiency and resilience against the interference of malicious nodes.