Performance Evaluation of Two Secure Communication Schemes on Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Along with the need of pervasive communication and intelligent decision support services for a modern citizen, vehicle communications technologies will be on demand and deployed in the near future. Because of the unique communication characteristics between vehicles such as self-organizing and decentralized topology, and high-speed movement, how to provide an efficient and secure communication scheme for VANETs (Vehicular Ad Hoc NETworks) has become an important issue in recent years. In this paper, we theoretically evaluate the performance efficiency of two recently published secure communication schemes proposed by Raya & Hubaux (2007) and Wang et al. (2008) on VANETs. From our investigation, we find that the selection of cryptographic module used in these two secure communication schemes should depend on the average number of hop counts between the source vehicle and the destination vehicle. In addition, our evaluation results can help secure communication schemes plot more efficient utilization policies on cryptographic modules to gain better performance in terms of the total transmission time for a message in VANETs.