A secure intersection-based routing protocol for data collection in urban vehicular networks

Data routing has gained great intention since the appearance of Vehicular Networks (VANETs). However, in the presence of attackers, reliable and trustworthy operations in such networks become impossible without securing routing protocols. In this paper, we target to study and design a secure routing protocol S-GyTAR for vehicular environments. Several kinds of routing techniques are proposed in the literature and could be classified into topology-based or position-based strategies. Position-based is the most investigated strategy in vehicular networks due to the unique characteristics of such networks. For this reason, this work is based on the well-known intersection-based routing protocol GyTAR, which exploits the greedy forwarding technique to relay data. In fact, we benefit from GyTAR's characteristics and reshape it to introduce a new distributed trust management strategy to secure routing. We design a cluster-based mechanism to monitor nodes and a reputation-based schema to evaluate the vehicles and classify them. We evaluate our proposal using NS3 simulator. Simulation results show high performances regarding the detection rate of malicious nodes and overhead with an amelioration of the end-to-end communication delay in the presence of malicious vehicles.