An Economical, Deployable and Secure Architecture for the Initial Deployment Stage of Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network

Abstract

With the fast development of vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) and related technologies in both academia and industry, many VANET systems have been presented in recent years. However, the majority of them have the assumption that all or most vehicles have installed with wireless communication devices and an elaborate roadside infrastructure exists. This assumption is not realistic for the critical and long transition period of VANET, when only a small portion of vehicles will be equipped with wireless devices (we refer to them as smart vehicles) and limited roadside infrastructure will exist. In this chapter, we present an economical, deployable and secure VANET system design that could facilitate the gradual deployment of wireless communication among vehicles. The system design is intended to stimulate VANET adoption without the need of elaborate infrastructure, large number of smart vehicles, huge investments by service providers or expensive end user devices. Economical Roadside Units (RSUs) that do not need expensive Internet access (especially in rural areas) can be incrementally deployed along critical road sections. They behave as temporary (traffic) information storage and relay points to serve any passing-by smart vehicles, while smart vehicles report/receive information to/from RSUs and relay information between RSUs. In addition, we present a public-key infrastructure based security architectures centered on these RSUs. We show that we can achieve connectivity with a high degree of confidence using only a small number of smart vehicles and RSUs. We present workable models for multi-confidence level data verification and time-location based secure positioning systems, along with possible threats and their defenses within the scope of our proposed designs.