Evaluation of the use of guard nodes for securing the routing in VANETs

We address the problem of effective vehicular routing in hostile scenarios where malicious nodes intend to jeopardize the delivery of messages. Compromised vehicles can severely affect the performance of the network by a number of attacks, such as selectively dropping messages, manipulating them on the fly, and the likes. One of the best performing solutions that has been used in static wireless sensor networks to deal with these attacks is based on the concept of watchdog nodes (also known as guard nodes) that collaborate to continue the forwarding of data packets in case a malicious behavior in a neighbor node is detected. In this work, we consider the beacon-less routing algorithm for vehicular environments routing protocol, which has been previously shown to perform very well in vehicular networks, and analyze whether a similar solution would be feasible for vehicular environments. Our simulation results in an urban scenario show that watchdog nodes are able to avoid up to a 50% of packet drops across different network densities and for different number of attackers, without introducing a significant increase in terms of control overhead. However, the overall performance of the routing protocol is still far from optimal. Thus, in the case of vehicular networks, watchdog nodes alone are not able to completely alleviate these security threats.