Analysis of authentication overhead in vehicular networks

Vehicular networks are one of the most challenging research areas in wireless ad hoc networks. The main benefit of this kind of communication is seen in active safety systems, which aim at increasing passengers´ safety by exchanging warning messages between vehicles. A main goal is to resist to various malicious abuses and security attacks. The IEEE1609.2 standard for vehicular ad hoc networks is based on the ECDSA algorithm for supporting the authentication mechanism. However, any security mechanism comes with overheads in terms of computation and communications. This paper provides an assessment of the processing and communication overhead of ECDSA. We analyze the impact of this mechanism on VANET performance. Then we focus on the impact of authentication communication on the braking distance.