Trusted and Secured Routing Protocol for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract

Objectives: To establish a trust based secured routing protocol to accurately distinguish malicious nodes that are dropping the important information and modifying the routes. Efforts are made to identify malicious nodes such as route modifiers and packet droppers. Methods/Statistical Analysis: Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) is a modern technology which help a vehicle and a driver in several ways. The main characteristics of VANETs are nodes i.e. vehicles with relatively high mobility and constantly changing topology. In case of data communication in VANETs, a source node must depend on the intermediate nodes to send its data packets to the destination node on multi-hop routes. VANETs can give better performance if all its nodes work properly with full cooperation during the communication. In VANETs, a node can generate and broadcast important and essential messages to other nodes in the network for safety reason. However, the generated message by a vehicle may not be reliable every time. In this paper we have proposed a trusted and secured routing protocol that evaluates the trust of a vehicle and also checks the message reliability. The proposed protocol is named as Trusted Vehicular Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (TVAODV) routing protocol which is the modification of Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector routing protocol. Since VANETs are mostly attacked by the malicious nodes; therefore better security solution is needed to stop such attacks. The proposed protocol introduces a trust model to establish a malicious node free route for source node to send its data packets to the destination node on multi-hop routes. Findings: The TVAODV protocol is simulated in Network Simulator (NS2) to check the performance and accuracy and also compared to AODV routing protocol. It is found that TVAODV is comparatively better in performance when VANET is in high mobility and versatile topology. The performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated using performance measurement metrics: average end-to-end delay, throughput, routing load and packet delivery ratio. The proposed protocol performance is evaluated in the presence of malicious (route modifiers and packet droppers) vehicles and the results shows that the proposed protocol is achieved better accuracy and it shows better performance compared to AODV routing protocol. Application/Improvements: The proposed protocol may be useful in the process of developing a better traffic management and transportation system. In this paper we have proposed a TVAODV routing protocol which includes trust model to evaluate the trust of vehicles as well as to establish a malicious free route.