Secure Incentives for Commercial Ad Dissemination in Vehicular Networks

This paper introduces a promising application over vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), where advertisers use VANETs to disseminate their commercial ads via car-to-car communication, targeting a large number of potential customers inside cars. However, due to the noncooperative behavior of selfish or even malicious nodes in real-world scenarios, such a vehicular advertisement system cannot be realized unless proper incentives and security mechanisms are in place. This paper presents signature-seeking drive (SSD), which is a secure incentive framework that stimulates cooperative dissemination of advertising messages among vehicular users in a secure way. Unlike existing incentive systems, SSD does not rely on tamper-proof hardware or game-theoretic approaches but leverages a public key infrastructure to provide secure incentives for cooperative nodes. With a set of ad dissemination designs proposed, we demonstrate that our SSD is robust in both incentive and security perspectives.