Secure Priority Based Inter-Vehicle Communication MAC Protocol for Highway Safety Messaging

In this paper we propose a secure MAC protocol for Inter-Vehicle Communication in conjunction with message priority for highway safety messaging. The protocol that can be implemented in both vehicular infrastructure and ad hoc networks provides the following security services: authentication, integrity, non-repudiation, and privacy. Using OPNET Modeler, we evaluate the performance of our proposed secure protocol and compare it against a basic protocol without security provisions. The comparison considers performance metrics such as the percentage of successful transmissions and average delay, for different system parameters such as number of vehicles, and percentage of priority 1 messages. We also discuss the tradeoffs between the security provision and the system performance. Our simulations reveal that the proposed secure protocol is a viable solution for secure priority based IVC, i.e., the protocol provides: 1) secure communication, 2) low average delays (lower than the tolerated delays in IVC), and 3) high reliability for priority 1 messages. Moreover, the proposed protocol is fully compatible with both IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.11e standards.