Temporal Blockchains for Intelligent Transportation Management and Autonomous Vehicle Support in the Internet of Vehicles

In the internet of vehicles (IoV) field, blockchain technology has been proposed for durable and trustworthy bookkeeping of the exchanged data. However, block timestamps assigned by miners are usually delayed with respect to events that generate the stored data, making them unusable for applications dealing with exact timing, like traffic law enforcement and insurance accident investigation. To overcome this shortcoming, the authors propose to add new timestamps to the blockchain, which are assigned by data originators to represent the valid time of data recorded within a transaction. The resulting enhanced blockchain data model, named BiTchain, can be considered from a temporal database perspective as a bitemporal data model. In order to let users and applications enjoy the potential of BiTchain, they also introduce an expressive temporal query language, named BiTEQL, defined as a TSQL2-like temporal extension of the EQL blockchain query language.