Performance impact of security on cooperative awareness in dense urban vehicular networks

Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) communication technology is expected to be the near-future pioneer in the traffic management and road-safety control area by provisioning timely accurate and location-aware information. The data generated by connected vehicles may be privacy-sensitive and could be hacked by intrusive receivers. In order to prevent malicious sources from injecting untrusted data content, relevant ITS standards included security processes and protocols to deal with the potential architecture-imposed security vulnerabilities. In this paper we study the impact of these processes on time-sensitive and safety related applications. In this regard, we deeply investigate the ITS architecture integrating the security components and evaluate its performance through extensive simulations for sparse to dense network of vehicles in terms of delay and packet delivery ratio. We consider this work as an important step towards understanding the tradeoff between security and communication efficiency in V2X networks.