DESCV—A Secure Wireless Communication Scheme for Vehicle ad hoc Networking

As an indispensable part of intelligent transportation system (ITS), inter-vehicle communication (IVC) emerges as an important research topic. The inter-vehicle communication works based on vehicular ad hoc networking (VANET), and provides communications among different vehicles. The wide applications of VANET helps to improve driving safety with the help of traffic information updates. To ensure that messages can be delivered effectively, the security in VANET becomes a critical issue. Conventional security systems rely heavily on centralized infrastructure to perform security operations such as key assignment and management, which may not suit well for VANET due to its high mobility and ad hoc links. Some works suggested that vehicles should be connected to fixed devices such as road side units (RSUs), but this requires deployment of a large number of costly RSUs in a specific area. This paper is focused on the issues on decentralized IVC without fixed infrastructure and proposes a method for Dynamic Establishment of Secure Communications in VANET (DESCV), which works in particular well for VANET communication key management when centralistic infrastructure or RSU is not available. We will demonstrate through synergy analysis and simulations that DESCV performs well in providing secure communications among vehicles traveling at a relative velocity as high as 240 km/h.