Anonymous TollPass: A Blockchain-Based Privacy-Preserving Electronic Toll Payment Model

As big data,Artificial Intelligence,and Vehicle-to-Everything(V2X)communication have advanced,Intelligent Transportation Systems(ITS)are being developed to enable efficient and safe transportation systems.Electronic Toll Collection(ETC),which is one of the services included in ITS systems,is an automated system that allows vehicles to pass through toll plazas without stopping for manual payment.The ETC system is widely deployed on highways due to its contribution to stabilizing the overall traffic system flow.To ensure secure and efficient toll payments,designing a distributed model for sharing toll payment information among untrusted toll service providers is necessary.However,the current ETC system operates under a centralized model.Additionally,both toll service providers and toll plazas know the toll usage history of vehicles.It raises concerns about revealing the entire driving routes and patterns of vehicles.To address these issues,blockchain technology,suitable for secure data management and data sharing in distributed systems,is being applied to the ETC system.Blockchain enables efficient and transparent management of ETC information.Nevertheless,the public nature of blockchain poses a challenge where users’usage records are exposed to all participants.To tackle this,we propose a blockchain-based toll ticket model named AnonymousTollPass that considers the privacy of vehicles.The proposed model utilizes traceable ring signatures to provide unlinkability between tickets used by a vehicle and prevent the identity of the vehicle using the ticket from being identified among the ring members for the ticket.Furthermore,malicious vehicles’identities can be traced when they attempt to reuse tickets.By conducting simulations,we show the effectiveness of the proposed model and demonstrate that gas fees required for executing the proposed smart contracts are only 10%(when the ring size is 50)of the fees required in previous studies.

A 2.1 μA WAKE-UP CIRCUIT FOR CHINESE ETC SYSTEM

This paper proposes a low power wake-up baseband circuit used in Chinese Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) system. To reduce the static power consumption, a low power biasing strategy is proposed. The proposed circuit is fabricated in TSMC 0.18 μm technology with an area of 0.09 mm 2 . Its current consumption is only 2.1 μA under 1.8 V power supply. It achieves a sensitivity of 0.95 mV at room temperature with a variation of only ±28% over -35℃ to 105℃.

On the Effects of Central Japan Expressway’s Commuter Toll Discount Policy in Nagoya Area

Road pricing policies have two equally important objectives that have to be considered： the optimal use of the road network and the fiscal sustainability for the management of the network. The aim of this work is to examine the effects on these two objectives of a recent pricing policy implemented in Japan＇s expressway networks. Recently the Nippon （Japan） Expressway Companies （NEXCO, operators of Japan＇s nation wide expressway network） have implemented several toll discount policies for users equipped with electronic toll collectors （ETCs）. One of the policies is the commuter discount policy that discounts 50% for a journey on the NEXCO expressway no longer than 100 km during the commuting peak hours. This paper examines its effect on congestion reduction in the road network of Nagoya area and its influence on the use of expressways operated by another major local public expressway company in Nagoya. The congestion easing effect of this policy is compared with a potential marginal cost pricing scheme. These observations suggest that policy coordination regarding toll levels is needed for expressway corporations and transportation authorities for improving transportation efficiency of utilization of the whole network.