Enhancing Cooperation in Wireless Vehicular Networks

Abstract

Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) may be seen as a special case of mobile ad-hoc networks, featured by their high mobility and changing topology. They will become very important in our society because of their applications in traffic safety and management. Operations in VANETs rely on the cooperation of participating nodes to route data for each other. Consequently, the quality of communication in VANETs can be degraded if the number of non-cooperative vehicles is very large. As distributed networks, nodes might behave noncooperatively for their own benefits. In order to prevent this non-cooperative behaviour from tampering packet relaying in the network, in this work we propose a self-organized and decentralized security mechanism. The system combines different techniques based on time and distance, reputation lists and acknowledgment messages. Within our proposal, privacy and integrity are protected while misbehaving and faulty nodes are detected and prevented from disrupting the network by using tools implemented with current technology. As an example of application of the proposal, its use to avoid traffic congestions is shown.