Ride-Sharing Services: From Centralization to Decentralization

Ride-sharing is a service that becomes basic and important for all communities due to its benefits for individuals like reducing travel cost and time and for societies like reducing gas emissions, congestions, and fuel consumption. Existing ride-sharing services are centralized and thus perform their functions through a central third party. Therefore, they suffer from various problems due to the centralized architecture namely single point of failure, lack of transparency, privacy violation, and many attacks such as distributed denial of service, etc. These problems urged the research community to shift to decentralization. Blockchain has revolutionized decentralization, which pushed the researchers to exploit it in ride-sharing and also other various fields. But what beyond implementing blockchain in ride-sharing? So, this paper answers the questions of where we are now in blockchain-based ride-sharing services and what is the next steps in them. It provides summary for previously proposed works in ride-sharing, specifically, blockchain-based. Followed by intensive analysis, comparison, and classification of these works. Finally, this paper provides guidance for future research with the promising and important directions in blockchain-based ride-sharing services.