Secure gateway localization and communication system for vehicular ad hoc networks

Internet access from vehicular networks is a very promising subject that needs to be investigated from the research community. Vehicles should be able to connect to the Internet, and provide drivers and passengers with a high number of services that need communication through gateways. Existing discovery protocols in VANets did not focus on secure gateway discovery in particular, but they considered the discovery of secure services in general. In this paper, we propose a secure hybrid adaptive gateway discovery and communication system for VANets that we call SEGAL. Our proposed SEGAL protocol aims to provide an efficient and secure gateway advertisement and discovery process for VANets. It is hybrid because it combines both proactive and reactive discovery approaches. Besides, it is adaptive because it shrinks or extends the advertisement zone of the gateway for scalability purposes. Our proposed protocol builds a secure clustered VANet and permits the exchange of gateway discovery messages through authenticated clusterheads and cluster members. We discuss the design of our protocol, and how it can overcome the possible attacks that can occur. Then we prove its efficiency and scalability in our performance evaluation. We show that our proposed SEGAL achieves high success rate, low response time and dropping rate, while maintaining the scalability in the VANet.