Social-based trustworthy data forwarding in vehicular delay tolerant networks

Abstract

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an emerging new communication technol-ogy which has attracted a lot of research attention from academic community and indus-try. For many applications in VANETs, information has to be transmitted through mul-tiple hops before it reaches its destination that makes it a subject to various security at-tacks and privacy breaches. Thus, security and privacy issues could limit its adaption by the public community. In this study, we propose and evaluate social based trustworthy data forwarding scheme for VANET. First, by using social network analysis techniques, we provide a framework to strategically deploy Road-Side Units (RSUs) infrastructure in order to im-prove reliability, efficiency, and high packet delivery for VANET. It is based on multiple social centrality assessments of street network which help in placing RSUs at high social intersections. This social placement of RSUs will dramatically improve data dissemina-tion as the opportunity of contacting vehicles increase while costs of RSU deployment can be kept under control. Second, we propose a secure and privacy-preserving message forwarding protocol, which utilizes RSUs to forward messages between vehicles. The protocol takes advantage of high performance capability of RSUs to store and forward messages to their destinations, where these RSUs utilize re-encryption technique to form a mix network to provide adequate privacy for senders and receivers. Then detailed anal-ysis in terms of security, message overhead, delivery ratio, and average delay are per-formed to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed scheme. Lastly, we tackled the security and privacy challenges existing in social-aware data diffusion by proposing an efficient vehicle social evaluation (EVSE) scheme. Our scheme enables each vehicle to show its authentic social evaluation to others while not disclosing its past location information. As a result, it can meet the prerequisites for the success of social aware data diffusion in VANETs.