Are Distributed Ledger Technologies Ready for Smart Transportation Systems?
This addresses scalability and responsiveness challenges for DLTs in smart transportation, but it is incremental as it builds on existing technologies.
The paper investigates whether Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) are ready to support smart transportation systems by proposing an architecture and testing it on IOTA, finding that while viable, improvements in responsiveness are needed.
The aim of this paper is to understand whether Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) are ready to support complex services, such as those related to Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). In smart transportation services, a huge amount of sensed data is generated by a multitude of vehicles. While DLTs provide very interesting features, such as immutability, traceability and verifiability of data, some doubts on the scalability and responsiveness of these technologies appear to be well-founded. We propose an architecture for ITS that resorts to DLT features. Moreover, we provide experimental results of a real test-bed over IOTA, a promising DLT for IoT. Results clearly show that, while the viability of the proposal cannot be rejected, further work is needed on the responsiveness of DLT infrastructures.