An efficient authentication scheme for secured service provisioning in edge-enabled vehicular cloud networks towards sustainable smart cities

Abstract

Vehicular networks are getting huge attention among the research community due to its tremendous potential to offer diversified applications and services to the drivers and passengers towards the realization of intelligent transportation system (ITS) for connected living and sustainable smart cities. Cloud computing (CC), which possesses large capacity in terms of computing and storage resource, may not be suitable for many vehicular applications like safety and emergency services due to high bandwidth requirement and large response time. Edge or fog computing can be a promising technology that can be integrated with vehicular networks to meet the requirements of less bandwidth usage and lower response time. Vehicular cloud network (VCN) extends cloud computing concepts among the vehicles in the vehicular networks to enable vehicles with excess computing, storage or bandwidth capacities to share the resources with other vehicles, who are willing to use that extra resource to fulfill their service requirements. Security poses a great challenge in a vehicular network due to high mobility, dynamic and frequent changes in topology and sudden variation in vehicle density in the roads. Privacy of the vehicular users must be ensured to encourage mass participation for making the system trustworthy. Both security and privacy are pre-requisites of a sustainable smart city. For secured service provisioning, before transmitting a message, connected vehicles must be authenticated. In this paper, we have proposed a system to authenticate vehicles for secured service provisioning in edge-enabled vehicular cloud networks. A novel technique has been developed to avoid redundant authentication to validate a vehicle successively across various RSUs (road side units). Extensive simulation works have been done and the outputs demonstrate efficacy of the proposed algorithm.