Secure intelligent traffic light control using fog computing

Abstract

As the number of vehicles grows, traffic efficiency is becoming a worldwide problem. Intelligent transportation system aims to improve the traffic efficiency, where intelligent traffic light control is an important component. Existing intelligent traffic light control systems face some challenges, e.g., avoiding heavy roadside sensors, resisting malicious vehicles and avoiding single-point failure. To cope with those challenges, we propose two secure intelligent traffic light control schemes using fog computing whose security are based on the hardness of the computational Diffie–Hellman puzzle and the hash collision puzzle respectively. The two schemes assume the traffic lights are fog devices. The first scheme is a simple extension of a recent scheme for defending denial-of-service attacks. We show this simple extension is not efficient when the vehicle density is high. The second scheme is much more efficient and is fog device friendly. Even the vehicle density is high, the traffic light may verify the validity of the vehicles efficiently.