Privacy-Enhanced Group Communication for Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks

Chibueze P Anyigor Ogah,Masoud Al Tawqi,Yue Cao,Philip Michael Asuquo,Zhili Sun,Haitham Cruickshank,Ganesh Chandrasekaran

doi:10.1109/ngmast.2015.67

Abstract

Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networking (VDTN) is a special instance of Vehicular Ad hoc Networking (VANET) and in particular Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) that utilizes infrastructure to enhance connectivity in challenged environments. While VANETs assume end-to-end connectivity, DTNs and VDTNs do not. Such networks are characterized by dynamic topology, partitioning due to lack of end-to-end connectivity, and opportunistic encounters between nodes. Notably, VDTNs enhances the capabilities DTNs to provide support for delay and intermittent connectivity. Hence, they can easily find applicability in the early stages of the deployment of vehicular networks characterized by low infrastructure deployment as is obtainable in rural areas and in military communications. Privacy implementation and evaluation is a major challenge in VDTNs. Group communication has become one of the well discussed means for achieving effective privacy and packet routing in ad hoc networks including VDTNs. However, most existing privacy schemes lack flexibility in terms of the dynamics of group formation and the level of privacy achievable. Again, it is difficult to evaluate privacy for sparse VDTNs for rural area and early stages of deployment. This paper reports on an improved privacy scheme based on group communication scheme in VDTNs. We analyze the performance of our model in terms of trade-off between privacy and performance based on delivery overhead and message delivery ratio using simulations. While this is a work in progress, we report that our scheme has considerable improvement compared to other similar schemes described in literature.

Highlights

Following the emergence of delay tolerant networks (DTNs) as a solution for connectivity in challenged environments such as deep space communication, Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs), disaster recovery networks, and underwater networks, a new class of ad hoc networks have emerged aptly regarded as Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks (VDTNs)
Deployment of DTNs with large vehicle density can suffer from abysmal performance especially if there is no adequate infrastructure support to assist in routing packet especially in the early stages of deployment
Since the number of active nodes in a group or network is proportional to the traffic generated per time, we utilized the threshold as a means of further ensuring privacy since it is difficult for an adversary to correlate multiple simultaneous traffic from multiple sources [13] as efficiently as it can from a single source

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Following the emergence of delay tolerant networks (DTNs) as a solution for connectivity in challenged environments such as deep space communication, Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs), disaster recovery networks, and underwater networks, a new class of ad hoc networks have emerged aptly regarded as Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks (VDTNs). Deployment of DTNs with large vehicle density can suffer from abysmal performance especially if there is no adequate infrastructure support to assist in routing packet especially in the early stages of deployment. To alleviate this and ensure a reasonable trade-off between cost and efficiency, road-side units (RSUs) can be introduced to enable Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communication. With the incorporation of RSUs, VDTNs optimize the capabilities of VANETs and adapts it to suit classical DTN environments and ensure support for the partitioning in the network. Security and privacy schemes tailored for conventional ad hoc networks do not suit VDTN environments [3].

RELATED WORK

SYSTEM DESCRIPTION

SIMULATION AND EVALUATION

Findings

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK