EdgeTC - a PBFT blockchain-based ETC scheme for smart cities

To improve the quality of mobility and transportation in a smart city, Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) system has been widely implemented along toll roads, which can automatically collect the usage fee from vehicles. There are many advantages of using ETC systems, such as no need to prepare cash, no need to waste time waiting in a queue, and be able to improve the air quality at tollgate. However, there are still some challenges remained for existing ETC systems, in relation to data storage, trustworthiness and transparency. To address this issue, there is a need for building a unified, decentralized, and trusted data storing platform. Motivated by this demand, in this work, we introduce a blockchain-based ETC system called EdgeTC. Unlike most other blockchain-based ETC platforms that use PoW or PoS, our system uses PBFT to achieve relatively faster performance. In the evaluation, we compare the system performance between Ethereum-based and Hyperledger-based ETC. The results indicate that Ethereum-based system suffers efficiency problems when the chain becomes long, while Hyperledger-based ETC can maintain a stable time consumption during the transactions.