Adaptive security provisioning for vehicular safety applications

Vehicular ad hoc network provides safety applications for next generation intelligent transport systems. By periodically transmitting mobility information in basic safety messages (BSMs), vehicles get an overview of the neighbourhood. As applications involving vehicular networks impact human safety, reliability of BSMs is a key requirement, which however is a challenging task in heavy traffic scenarios where many BSMs are queued up simultaneously for signature verification. This results in long verification delays for many critical BSMs from nearby vehicles. To overcome this challenge, we propose two adaptive security mechanisms in this paper that can be used by the ITS applications to enhance their QoS and maintain good level of security. The first technique is a receiver-oriented technique that uses channel aware mechanism to prioritise the signature verification of BSMs from closer neighbours. The second technique is transmitter based that can adaptively select the best security level for BSMs according to cryptographic loss rate. Simulation results verify the performance enhancement achieved by the proposed framework in terms of several safety awareness metrics as compared with the existing schemes.