A Secure and Stable Routing Protocol for VANET Under Malicious Attacks

Abstract

Changing over digital age is becoming the driving force for modern approaches to provide a safe road system. Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are new networks that are used in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). The interest in this type of networks lies in the promising challenge to enhance safety in vehicular transportation systems trying to reduce driving problems. Routing is one of the most important operations in VANET as it deals with data exchange between nodes through wireless channels, which increases in requirements of security due to wireless systems have far more susceptibility to adversary’s malicious attacks than the classic wired systems. Hence, we propose a stable and secure routing protocol that combines the features of clustering algorithm and cuckoo search algorithm to establish an efficient, secure and stable routing. In our proposed protocol, k-means clustering is used for cluster formation and a cuckoo search algorithm is used for selecting the cluster head. The selection of cluster head depends on five weight parameters, the most important of which are speed of node and trust factor with neighborhood nodes. The weight parameters are used as a fitness function along with the cuckoo search algorithm to ensure a stable and secure route. The simulation is carried out in simulator NS-3 and it demonstrates that the proposed routing protocol significantly improves the packet delivery ratio, average delay, packet loss ratio, overhead and throughput while compared to popular routing protocol AODV under malicious attacks.