Enabling less-infrastructure road communication networks for VANETs

Securing the inter-vehicle communication is a vital aspect for VANETs. Thus, authentication as a primary security function is required for the participant vehicles and their generated message. Mostly, symmetric authentication protocols which depend on the network infrastructure Road Side Units (RSUs) have low computation and communication overhead. In this work, a Central Push-based Replication Protocol (CPRP) is proposed to support the availability of symmetric authentication offered by the RSUs in cases of RSUs failures. A performance analysis for CPRP has been elaborated with different ratios of RSU failures in different realistic scenarios. The results showed that CPRP can significantly improve the authentication service availability in general and can enable less infrastructure VANETs.