Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are an extreme case of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). High speed and frequent network topology changes are the main characteristics of vehicular networks. These characteristics lead to special issues and challenges in the network design, especially at the medium access control (MAC) layer. Due to high speed of nodes and their frequent disconnections, it is difficult to design a MAC scheme in VANETs that satisfies the quality-of-service requirements in all networking scenarios. In this thesis, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of the mobility impact on the IEEE 802.11p MAC performance. The study evaluates basic performance metrics such as packet delivery ratio, throughput, and delay, as well as the impact of mobility factors. The study also presents a relation between the mobility factors and the respective medium access behavior. Moreover, a new unfairness problem according to node relative speed is identified for both broadcast and unicast scenarios. To achieve better performance, we propose two dynamic contention window mechanisms to alleviate network performance degradation due to high mobility. Extensive simulation results show the significant impact of mobility on the IEEE 802.11p MAC performance, an identification of a new unfairness problem in the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, and the effectiveness of the proposed MAC schemes.

Vehicular communication networking is a promising approach for facilitating road safety, traffic management, and infotainment dissemination for drivers and passengers. However, it is subject to various malicious abuses and security attacks which hinder it from practical implementation. In this study, we propose a novel security protocol called GSIS based on group signature and identity-based signature schemes to meet the unique requirements of vehicular communication networks. The proposed protocol not only guarantees security and anonymity, but also provides easy traceability when the identity of the sender of a message has to be revealed by the authority. However, the cryptographic operations introduced in GSIS as well as the existing public key based message authentication protocols incur some computation and communication overhead which affect the system performance. Simulation results show that the GSIS security protocol is only applicable under light traffic conditions in terms of the message end to end delay and message loss ratio. Both the GSIS protocol and the existing public key based security protocols have to sign and verify all the received messages with asymmetric algorithms. The PKI based approach also has to attach a public key certificate in each packet. Therefore, to enhance the system performance and mitigate the message overhead without compromising the security requirement, this study further proposes an enhanced TESLA based Secure Vehicular Communication (TSVC) protocol. In TSVC, the communication overhead can be significantly reduced due to the MAC tag attached in each packet and only a fast hash operation is required to verify each packet. Simulation results show that TSVC maintains acceptable message latency, using a much smaller packet size, and significantly reduces the message loss ratio as compared to GSIS and existing PKI based protocols, especially when the traffic is denser. We conclude that the proposed approach could serve as good candidate for future vehicular communication networks.

In this paper, we propose a trust-based message propagation and evaluation framework to support the effective evaluation of information sent by peers and the immediate control of false information in a VANET. More specifically, our trust-based message propagation collects peers’ trust opinions about a message sent by a peer (message sender) during the propagation of the message. We improve on an existing cluster-based data routing mechanism by employing a secure and efficient identity-based aggregation scheme for the aggregation and propagation of the sender’s message and the trust opinions. These trust opinions weighted by the trustworthiness of the peers modeled using a combination of role-based and experience-based trust metrics are used by cluster leaders to compute a ma jority opinion about the sender’s message, in order to proactively detect false information. Malicious messages are dropped and controlled to a local minimum without further affecting other peers. Our trust-based message evaluation allows each peer to evaluate the trustworthiness of the message by also taking into account other peers’ trust opinions about the message and the peer-to-peer trust of these peers. The result of the evaluation derives an effective action decision for the peer. We evaluate our framework in simulations of real life traffic scenarios by employing real maps with vehicle entities following traffic rules and road limits. Some entities involved in the simulations are possibly malicious and may send false information to mislead others or spread spam messages to jam the network. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves network scalability by reducing the utilization of wireless bandwidth caused by a large number of malicious messages. Our system is also demonstrated to be effective in mitigating against malicious messages and protecting peers from being affected. Thus, our framework is particularly valuable in the deployment of VANETs by achieving a high level of scalability and effectiveness.

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are an extreme case of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). High speed and frequent network topology changes are the main characteristics of vehicular networks. These characteristics lead to special issues and challenges in the network design, especially at the medium access control (MAC) layer. Due to high speed of nodes and their frequent disconnections, it is difficult to design a MAC scheme in VANETs that satisfies the quality-of-service requirements in all networking scenarios. In this thesis, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of the mobility impact on the IEEE 802.11p MAC performance. The study evaluates basic performance metrics such as packet delivery ratio, throughput, and delay, as well as the impact of mobility factors. The study also presents a relation between the mobility factors and the respective medium access behavior. Moreover, a new unfairness problem according to node relative speed is identified for both broadcast and unicast scenarios. To achieve better performance, we propose two dynamic contention window mechanisms to alleviate network performance degradation due to high mobility. Extensive simulation results show the significant impact of mobility on the IEEE 802.11p MAC performance, an identification of a new unfairness problem in the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, and the effectiveness of the proposed MAC schemes.

This thesis presents a protocol for intervehicle communication for use in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET). VANET is a natural extension of mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) in which the restrictions related to power and mobility are relaxed. The routing protocols used for MANETs are generally dependent on the state of the network. With changes in the network topology, routing messages are generated so that the states of the routers in the network are updated. In the case of VANETs, in which the level of node mobility is high, message-routing overhead has serious implications for the scalability and throughput of the routing protocol. This thesis introduces criteria that are recommended for use when protocols are designed for VANET applications and presents the Selected Node Geographic Forwarding (SNGF) protocol. The SNGF protocol implements controlled flooding in an efficient manner in order to reduce unnecessary communication overhead. The protocol has a destination discovery mechanism that allows it to initiate correspondence between nodes without reliance on static location services. The protocol avoids formation of clusters by using the concept of selective forwarding, thus providing the advantages of cluster based approaches without actually forming one itself. It effectively deals with blind flooding by introducing a comprehensive retransmission time delay in the nodes. This retransmission delay favors the nodes in the direction of the destination and prevents other nodes from retransmitting the same message. The SNGF protocol does not use routing tables, which require frequent updates in mobile networks, instead it relies on directing the messages to geographic locations which are forwarded by any available intermediary nodes. The protocol also provides techniques for handling network fragmentation which can be a frequent problem in vehicular networks. It is capable of delayed message transmission and multiple route discovery in the case of the non-availability of the shortest path to the destination. To evaluate the performance of the SNGF protocol, an extensive study of mobile networks was conducted using the NS2 simulator. The simulation results demonstrate the reachability of the protocol, its scalability advantages and its total independence from location services. The SNGF protocol allows each participating node to operate independently of other nodes in the network. Nodes in the network are able to communicate with other nodes without ever becoming dependent on intermediary nodes. This feature opens new possibility for individual node based application development in ad hoc networks. The traffic profiling is described as it would be observed by an independent node participating in VANET using the SNGF protocol. The node communicates with other nodes and collects relevant data through the discourse capability of SNGF. The data collected by the node is viewed as a snapshot in time of the traffic conditions down the road based upon which future traffic condition is predicted. Traffic profiling is investigated for different levels of VANET deployment. The simulation results show that the proposed method of traffic profiling in a VANET environment using the SNGF protocol is viable for even lower levels of deployment.

Improving road safety and traffic efficiency has been a long-term endeavor for the government, automobile industry and academia. Recently, the U.S. Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has allocated a 75 MHz spectrum at 5.9 GHz for vehicular communications, opening a new door to combat the road fatalities by letting vehicles communicate to each other on the roads. Those communicating vehicles form a huge Ad Hoc Network, namely Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET). In VANETs, a variety of applications ranging from the safety related (e.g. emergence report, collision warning) to the non-safety related (e.g., delay tolerant network, infortainment sharing) are enabled by vehicle-to-vehicle (V-2-V) and vehicle-to-roadside (V-2-I) communications. However, the flourish of VANETs still hinges on fully understanding and managing the challenging issues over which the public show concern, particularly, security and privacy preservation issues. If the traffic related messages are not authenticated and integrity-protected in VANETs, a single bogus and/or malicious message can potentially incur a terrible traffic accident. In addition, considering VANET is usually implemented in civilian scenarios where locations of vehicles are closely related to drivers, VANET cannot be widely accepted by the public if VANET discloses the privacy information of the drivers, i.e., identity privacy and location privacy. Therefore, security and privacy preservation must be well addressed prior to its wide acceptance. Over the past years, much research has been done on considering VANET's unique characteristics and addressed some security and privacy issues in VANETs; however, little of it has taken the social characteristics of VANET into consideration. In VANETs, vehicles are usually driven in a city environment, and thus we can envision that the mobility of vehicles directly reflects drivers' social preferences and daily tasks, for example, the places where they usually go for shopping or work. Due to these human factors in VANETs, not only the safety related applications but also the non-safety related applications will have some social characteristics. In this thesis, we emphasize VANET's social characteristics and introduce the concept of vehicular social network (VSN), where both the safety and non-safety related applications in VANETs are influenced by human factors including human mobility, human self-interest status, and human preferences. In particular, we carry on research on vehicular delay tolerant networks and infotainment sharing --- two important non-safety related applications of VSN, and address the challenging security and privacy issues related to them. The main contributions are, i) taking the human mobility into consideration, we first propose a novel social based privacy-preserving packet forwarding protocol, called SPRING, for vehicular delay tolerant network, which is characterized by deploying roadside units (RSUs) at high social intersections to assist in packet forwarding. With the help of high-social RSUs, the probability of packet drop is dramatically reduced and as a result high reliability of packet forwarding in vehicular delay tolerant network can be achieved. In addition, the SPRING protocol also achieves conditional privacy preservation and resist most attacks facing vehicular delay tolerant network, such as packet analysis attack, packet tracing attack, and black (grey) hole attacks. Furthermore, based on the ``Sacrificing the Plum Tree for the Peach Tree" --- one of the Thirty-Six Strategies of Ancient China, we also propose a socialspot-based packet forwarding (SPF) protocol for protecting receiver-location privacy, and present an effective pseudonyms changing at social spots strategy, called PCS, to facilitate vehicles to achieve high-level location privacy in vehicular social network; ii) to protect the human factor --- interest preference privacy in vehicular social networks, we propose an efficient privacy-preserving protocol, called FLIP, for vehicles to find like-mined ones on the road, which allows two vehicles sharing the common interest to identify each other and establish a shared session key, and at the same time, protects their interest privacy (IP) from other vehicles who do not share the same interest on the road. To generalize the FLIP protocol, we also propose a lightweight privacy-preserving scalar product computation (PPSPC) protocol, which, compared with the previously reported PPSPC protocols, is more efficient in terms of computation and communication overheads; and iii) to deal with the human factor -- self-interest issue in vehicular delay tolerant network, we propose a practical incentive protocol, called Pi, to stimulate self-interest vehicles to cooperate in forwarding bundle packets. Through the adoption of the proper incentive policies, the proposed Pi protocol can not only improve the whole vehicle delay tolerant network's performance in terms of high delivery ratio and low average delay, but also achieve the fairness among vehicles. The research results of the thesis should be useful to the implementation of secure and privacy-preserving vehicular social networks.

In this Thesis, we propose a Cluster-based TDMA (CBT) scheme for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET). In the CBT, the collision problems can be solved when packets are transmitted at the same time. In the Intra-cluster communications, the VANET Coordinator (VC) is determined by randomly choosing a number of zero or one. Other VANET Nodes (VNs) then randomly select different time slots to transmit their Bandwidth Requests (BRs). If more than two VNs choose the same slots for BRs, collision will occur. The failed VNs will continue to issue BRs in the next TDMA frames. After the time slots are scheduled by VC, all VNs can use the designated time slots to send data. In the Inter-cluster communications, when two clusters are approaching to each other, two VCs must exchange Slot Allocation MAP (SAM) using the random zero-or-one scheme. The VCs successfully receive SAM must reschedule the time slots. For the purpose of performance evaluation, we calculate the average time slots of selecting VC and the average time slots required for successful BRs. We also compute the average time slots required for successfully transmitting SAM and the average time slots required for broadcasting SAM to all VNs. Finally, we calculate the average time slots required for waiting before data transmission. To validate the mathematical results, we perform a simulation written in C++. When comparing the mathematical results to the simulation results, we observe that in the average time slots required for BR, the former is larger than the latter. This is because in the mathematical equations it is difficult to specify which time slots are used by VNs to transmit BRs. However, the rest of performance comparisons, the two results are very close.

In the VANET environment, the security of traffic information between vehicles is very important. The messages need to be real-time, and the complexity of authentication should be low. Our proposed method focus on the identity verification based on bilinear pairing, therefore, vehicles, roadside units (RSUs), central authorities (CAs) and trust authority (TA) can verify the identity of each other. After the identity authentication, RSUs will broadcast messages containing chameleon hashing values of verified vehicles, to the other RSUs and vehicles. In the future, vehicles can communicate with the verified vehicles, and verify the messages by these chameleon hashing values. The advantages of the propose method is mainly: 1. Based on the identity-based cryptography (i.e. IBC), the vehicles, RSUs, CAs and TA can verify the message each other. 2. The vehicles can verify the source and legitimacy of the public/private key. 3. The vehicles do not need to show any certificate to verify the identity, avoiding the certificate is exposed for a long time and causing attacks. 4. We can verify the messages through chameleon function and does not need to wait for RSU to verify, it would have good latency performance. 5. We don¡¦t need to re-verify the identity and consult the common keys when the vehicles hand off within the different cover ranges of the RSUs. 6. Not only within the RSUs, our proposal but also can execute in somewhere without RSU. Finally, our proposal method can fulfill the authentication, data integrity, non-repudiation, condition-privacy and untraceable.

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