Joint security and QoS provisioning in cooperative vehicular ad hoc networks

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), security always comes with a price in terms of QoS performance degradation. In this paper, we take an integrated approach of optimizing both security and QoS parameters, and study the tradeoffs between them in VANETs. Specifically, we use recent advances in cooperative communication to enhance the QoS performance of VANETs. In addition, we present a prevention-based security technique that provides both hop-by-hop and end-to-end authentication and integrity protection. We derive the closed-form effective secure throughput considering both security and QoS provisioning in VANETs with cooperative communications. The system is formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). Simulation results are presented to show that our proposed scheme can substantially improve the effective secure throughput of VANETs with cooperative communications.