On the Interrelation of Security, QoS, and Safety in Cooperative ITS

Cooperative intelligent transport system (C-ITS) is an emerging technology that enables secure and safe road travel using wireless communications. Vehicles regularly share their mobility information with the neighborhood road traffic and infrastructure-based road side units using cooperative awareness messages (CAMs) to develop a local dynamic map for safety applications. Since the applications provided by C-ITS are related to human safety, reliable as well as secure communications are required. To protect the vehicular network from untrusted data of malicious users that could cause network congestion and reduce vehicle safety, ITS standards have proposed various security procedures. In this paper, we analyze the interrelation between security, quality of service (QoS), and safety awareness of vehicles in C-ITS. To formulate an accurate measure of vehicle safety awareness, we first propose novel vehicle and infrastructure centric metrics that use the number of received CAMs, their accuracy, safety importance, and vehicle heading. We then implement the standard CAM signature and verification procedure in the ITS standard. Using simulation results and our proposed metrics, we show the impact of security signature and verification speed on the level of vehicle awareness and, hence, QoS in different road traffic conditions.