SCOOL: A secure traffic congestion control protocol for VANETs

Traffic efficiency applications are becoming increasingly popular over the road networks in the last few years. This type of applications aims mainly at increasing the traffic fluency over the road network, which minimizes the travel time of each vehicle towards its targeted destinations. The Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) technology has been utilized to design these applications. Communications between vehicles, V2V, and between vehicles and installed Road Side Units (RSUs), V2I, helped designing these applications. Malicious, selfish and intruder drivers can take advantages of other cooperative drivers and use their trust. This paper introduces a Secure COngestion contrOL (SCOOL) protocol. This protocol aims to guarantee integrity and authenticity of transmitted data. It is designed to provide the security requirements of traffic efficiency protocols that have been proposed using the technology of VANETs. SCOOL also aims to preserve the privacy of the cooperative vehicles and drivers. From the experimental results we can infer that SCOOL detects the malicious nodes over the road network which enhances the correctness of the traffic efficiency applications.