Fast Secure Routing for Highly Mobile Large-Scale Ad-Hoc Vehicular Networks

In highly mobile large-scale vehicular ad-hoc networks, routing protocols must be fast and efficient in terms of low routing discovery delay and communication overhead to support the applications such as car talk. Such requirement becomes more difficult to achieve when inducing security enhancement to tackle the authentication of routing messages. In this paper, we propose a lightweight (fast) secure routing protocol, secure proactive tree-based routing (SPTR) to hit these two points. SPTR makes use of the characteristics of VANET networks, that is, the traffic originates from or terminates at the gateway or road side unit. SPRT also takes advantages of certificate-less ID-based cryptography to provide message authentication. Analysis and simulations show that SPTR has low routing discovery delay and communication overhead in highly mobile large-scale VANET even if authenticating routing messages.