Open Access

ARTICLE

A Secured Message Transmission Protocol for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

by A. F. M. Suaib Akhter^1,*, A. F. M. Shahen Shah², Mohiuddin Ahmed³, Nour Moustafa⁴, Unal Çavuşoğlu¹, Ahmet Zengin¹

1 Department of Computer Engineering, Sakarya University, Sakarya, 54050, Turkey
2 Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Istanbul Gelisim University, Istanbul, Turkey
3 School of Science, Edith Cowan University, Perth, WA6027, Australia
4 School of Engineering and Information Technology, UNSW, Canberra BC, 2610, Australia

* Corresponding Author: A. F. M. Suaib Akhter. Email:

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Security and Computing in Internet of Things)

Computers, Materials & Continua 2021, 68(1), 229-246. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2021.015447

Received 18 November 2020; Accepted 21 December 2020; Issue published 22 March 2021

Abstract

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) become a very crucial addition in the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). It is challenging for a VANET system to provide security services and parallelly maintain high throughput by utilizing limited resources. To overcome these challenges, we propose a blockchain-based Secured Cluster-based MAC (SCB-MAC) protocol. The nearby vehicles heading towards the same direction will form a cluster and each of the clusters has its blockchain to store and distribute the safety messages. The message which contains emergency information and requires Strict Delay Requirement (SDR) for transmission are called safety messages (SM). Cluster Members (CMs) sign SMs with their private keys while sending them to the blockchain to confirm authentication, integrity, and confidentiality of the message. A Certificate Authority (CA) is responsible for physical verification, key generation, and privacy preservation of the vehicles. We implemented a test scenario as proof of concept and tested the safety message transmission (SMT) protocol in a real-world platform. Computational and storage overhead analysis shows that the proposed protocol for SMT implements security, authentication, integrity, robustness, non-repudiation, etc. while maintaining the SDR. Messages that are less important compared to the SMs are called non-safety messages (NSM) and vehicles use RTS/CTS mechanism for NSM transmission. Numerical studies show that the proposed NSM transmission method maintains 6 times more throughput, 2 times less delay and 125% less Packet Dropping Rate (PDR) than traditional MAC protocols. These results prove that the proposed protocol outperforms the traditional MAC protocols.

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Citations