A joint design of security and quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning in vehicular ad hoc networks with cooperative communications

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), some distinct characteristics, such as high node mobility, introduce new non-trivial challenges to quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning. Although some excellent works have been done on QoS issues in VANETs, security issues are largely ignored in these works. However, it is know that security always comes at a price in terms of QoS performance degradation. In this article, we consider security and QoS issues jointly for VANETs with cooperative communications. We take an integrated approach of optimizing both security and QoS parameters, and study the tradeoffs between them in VANETs. Specifically, we use recent advances in cooperative communication to enhance the QoS performance of VANETs. In addition, we present a prevention-based security technique that provides both hop-by-hop and end-to-end authentication and integrity protection. We derive the closed-form effective secure throughput considering both security and QoS provisioning in VANETs with cooperative communications. The system is formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process. Simulation results are presented to show that security schemes have significant impacts on the throughput QoS of VANETs, and our proposed scheme can substantially improve the effective secure throughput of VANETs with cooperative communications.