The Dynamics of Vehicular Networks in Urban Environments

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) have emerged as a platform to support intelligent inter-vehicle communication and improve traffic safety and performance. The road-constrained, high mobility of vehicles, their unbounded power source, and the emergence of roadside wireless infrastructures make VANETs a challenging research topic. A key to the development of protocols for inter-vehicle communication and services lies in the knowledge of the topological characteristics of the VANET communication graph. This paper explores the dynamics of VANETs in urban environments and investigates the impact of these findings in the design of VANET routing protocols. Using both real and realistic mobility traces, we study the networking shape of VANETs under different transmission and market penetration ranges. Given that a number of RSUs have to be deployed for disseminating information to vehicles in an urban area, we also study their impact on vehicular connectivity. Through extensive simulations we investigate the performance of VANET routing protocols by exploiting the knowledge of VANET graphs analysis.Comment: Revised our testbed with even more realistic mobility traces. Used the location of real Wi-Fi hotspots to simulate RSUs in our study. Used a larger, real mobility trace set, from taxis in Shanghai. Examine the implications of our findings in the design of VANET routing protocols by implementing in ns-3 two routing protocols (GPCR & VADD). Updated the bibliography section with new research work

GSTR: Secure Multi-hop Message Dissemination in Connected Vehicles using Social Trust Model

The emergence of connected vehicles paradigm has made secure communication a key concern amongst the connected vehicles. Communication between the vehicles and Road Side Units (RSUs) is critical to disseminate message among the vehicles. We focus on secure message transmission in connected vehicles using multi_hop social networks environment to deliver the message with varying trustworthiness. We proposed a Geographic Social Trust Routing (GSTR) approach; messages are propagated using multiple hops and by considering the various available users in the vehicular network. GSTR is proposed in an application perspective with an assumption that the users are socially connected. The users are selected based on trustworthiness as defined by social connectivity. The route to send a message is calculated based on the highest trust level of each node by using the nodes social network connections along the path in the network. GSTR determines the shortest route using the trusted nodes along the route for message dissemination. GSTR is made delay tolerant by introducing message storage in the cloud if a trustworthy node is unavailable to deliver the message. We compared the proposed approach with Geographic and Traffic Load based Routing (GTLR), Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR), Trust-based GPSR (T_GPSR). The performance results obtained show that GSTR ensures efficient resource utilization, lower packet losses at high vehicle densities

MobileTrust: Secure Knowledge Integration in VANETs

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANET) are becoming popular due to the emergence of the Internet of Things and ambient intelligence applications. In such networks, secure resource sharing functionality is accomplished by incorporating trust schemes. Current solutions adopt peer-to-peer technologies that can cover the large operational area. However, these systems fail to capture some inherent properties of VANETs, such as fast and ephemeral interaction, making robust trust evaluation of crowdsourcing challenging. In this article, we propose MobileTrust—a hybrid trust-based system for secure resource sharing in VANETs. The proposal is a breakthrough in centralized trust computing that utilizes cloud and upcoming 5G technologies to provide robust trust establishment with global scalability. The ad hoc communication is energy-efficient and protects the system against threats that are not countered by the current settings. To evaluate its performance and effectiveness, MobileTrust is modelled in the SUMO simulator and tested on the traffic features of the small-size German city of Eichstatt. Similar schemes are implemented in the same platform to provide a fair comparison. Moreover, MobileTrust is deployed on a typical embedded system platform and applied on a real smart car installation for monitoring traffic and road-state parameters of an urban application. The proposed system is developed under the EU-founded THREAT-ARREST project, to provide security, privacy, and trust in an intelligent and energy-aware transportation scenario, bringing closer the vision of sustainable circular economy

A topology-oblivious routing protocol for NDN-VANETs

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are characterized by intermittent connectivity, which leads to failures of end-to-end paths between nodes. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a network paradigm that deals with such problems, since information is forwarded based on content and not on the location of the hosts. In this work, we propose an enhanced routing protocol of our previous topology-oblivious Multihop, Multipath, and Multichannel NDN for VANETs (MMM-VNDN) routing strategy that exploits several paths to achieve more efficient content retrieval. Our new enhanced protocol, i mproved MMM-VNDN (iMMM-VNDN), creates paths between a requester node and a provider by broadcasting Interest messages. When a provider responds with a Data message to a broadcast Interest message, we create unicast routes between nodes, by using the MAC address(es) as the distinct address(es) of each node. iMMM-VNDN extracts and thus creates routes based on the MAC addresses from the strategy layer of an NDN node. Simulation results show that our routing strategy performs better than other state of the art strategies in terms of Interest Satisfaction Rate, while keeping the latency and jitter of messages low

Fixed Cluster Based Cluster Head Selection Algorithm in Vehicular Adhoc Network

The emergence of Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANETs) is expected support variety of applications for driver assistance, traffic efficiency and road safety. For proper transmission of messages in VANET, one of the proposed solutions is dividing the network into clusters and then selecting a cluster head (CH) in each cluster. This can decrease the communication overhead between road side units (RSUs) and other components of VANETs, because instead of every node communicating with RSU, only CH communicates with RSU and relays relevant messages. In clustering, an important step is the selection of CH. In this thesis, we implemented vehicle to vehicle (V2V), cluster head to road side unit and road side unit to trusted authority authentication for the clustered network. We also presented a heuristic algorithm for selecting a suitable vehicle as the cluster head in a cluster. For the selection of head vehicle, we used weighted fitness values based on three parameters; trust value, position from the cluster boundary and absolute relative average speed. Simulation results indicate that the proposed approach can lead to improvements in terms of QoS metrics like delay, throughput and packet delivery ratio

MARINE: Man-in-the-middle attack resistant trust model IN connEcted vehicles

Vehicular Ad-hoc NETwork (VANET), a novel technology holds a paramount importance within the transportation domain due to its abilities to increase traffic efficiency and safety. Connected vehicles propagate sensitive information which must be shared with the neighbors in a secure environment. However, VANET may also include dishonest nodes such as Man-in-the-Middle (MiTM) attackers aiming to distribute and share malicious content with the vehicles, thus polluting the network with compromised information. In this regard, establishing trust among connected vehicles can increase security as every participating vehicle will generate and propagate authentic, accurate and trusted content within the network. In this paper, we propose a novel trust model, namely, Man-in-the-middle Attack Resistance trust model IN connEcted vehicles (MARINE), which identifies dishonest nodes performing MiTM attacks in an efficient way as well as revokes their credentials. Every node running MARINE system first establishes trust for the sender by performing multi-dimensional plausibility checks. Once the receiver verifies the trustworthiness of the sender, the received data is then evaluated both directly and indirectly. Extensive simulations are carried out to evaluate the performance and accuracy of MARINE rigorously across three MiTM attacker models and the bench-marked trust model. Simulation results show that for a network containing 35% MiTM attackers, MARINE outperforms the state of the art trust model by 15%, 18%, and 17% improvements in precision, recall and F-score, respectively.N/A