Performance Evaluation of Mobile Multicast Session Initialization Techniques for Remote Software Upload in Vehicle ECUs

Updating software in vehicle Electronic Control Units (ECUs) will become a mandatory requirement for a variety of reasons, for examples, to update functionality of an existing system, add new functionality, remove software bugs and to cope up with ITS infrastructure. Since multicasting is the most efficient method of group communication, updating software in an ECU of a large number of vehicles could benefit from it. In a previous work, we proposed an infrastructure-based mobile multicasting for remote software upload (RSU) in vehicle ECUs where an ECU receives the software from a remote software distribution center using the road side Base Stations (BSs) as gateways. Consequently, we proposed two multicast session establishment techniques based on the degree of trust on the BSs named Fully-trusted (FT) and Semi-trusted (ST) systems. In this paper, we conduct extensive simulation studies to evaluate the performance of these two techniques by finding the average latency to authenticate a vehicle and provide it with the multicast session key by the software provider during multicast session initialization. Simulation results show that the link establishment latency per vehicle of our proposed schemes is in the range of few seconds and the ST system requires two to three times higher time than the FT system.