DARVAN: A fully decentralized anonymous and reliable routing for VANets

Abstract

With the recent advances in the automobile industry and the emergence of smart self-driving vehicles, the increasing need for proper and optimal Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANet) protocols has drawn the attention of many researchers. Nevertheless, the VANet community has yet to agree on a unified and suitable set of protocols for such networks. One of the major concerns in these networks is security considerations, which are significant because of the specific characteristics of VANet. In this article, we aim to address the location privacy and reliability issues in VANet routing protocols. We propose DARVAN, a fully decentralized infrastructure that provides anonymous and reliable routing in VANets. By employing a distributed database and collective consensus, DARVAN minimizes the exposure of critical data, which is conventionally stored and processed in centralized units. DARVAN is deployed by modifying the I2P protocol, which aims to improve routing reliability and resilience to many adversary activities in VANets. Specifically, with DARVAN, we present an effective and efficient network-level mitigation for Sybil attacks in Vanets. Our extensive simulations on NS3 show that DARVAN performs well in terms of packet delivery ratio, overhead, delay, and reliability compared to the previous anonymous scheme proposed for VANet routing.