Secure Routing Protocol Based on Junction Selection in VANETs (SERPROV)

Abstract

Road safety has become a major issue over the last twenty years. The existing transportation system has become inefficient as the number of vehicles has increased remarkably, causing more accidents and other problems. To meet these challenges, the field of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) has been proposed. ITS, also known as intelligent transport, is based on vehicle ad hoc networks (VANETs), a subset of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) that use moving cars as nodes to create mobile networks. ITS includes various applications such as cooperative traffic monitoring, blind crossings, collision avoidance and traffic flow control. However, dynamic topology and secure communication remain major challenges due to the high mobility of nodes and the random speed of vehicles. This paper proposes a secure protocol called SERPROV (Secure Routing Protocol based on Junction Selection in VANETs) that combines routing and security using a junction selection mechanism and applies an asymmetric cryptography protocol. Simulation results show that SERPROV improves response time and packet delivery ratio compared to existing protocols for a number of vehicles less than or equal to 300. We plan to implement blockchain technology in the future to replace the public key register, thus making the protocol fully decentralized and further exploring the confidentiality of messages exchanged in the VANET environment.