Secure Tilted-Rectangular-Shaped Request Zone Location-Aided Routing Protocol (STRS-RZLAR) for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Securing data communication in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) becomes a demand to provide safe and secure warning messages to drivers. In this paper, a secure routing protocol for VANETs was proposed. The protocol integrates a security unit that adopts a modified Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol with an optimized location-aided routing protocol (LAR) that adopts a tilted rectangular shaped (TRS) request zone. The proposed Secure Tilted-Rectangular-Shaped Request Zone Location-Aided Routing Protocol (STRS-RZLAR) provides a secure communication between vehicles in VANETs and thus protects the overall communication scheme from man-in-the-middle attack (MITMA). By conducting extensive simulation results using two main network parameters: vehicular node density and the number of the malicious nodes, the proposed routing protocol outperforms the insecure TRS-LAR and the standard LAR in terms of secure data delivery.