Drone-Assisted Multi-Purpose Roadside Units for Intelligent Transportation Systems

As drones are becoming prevalent to be deployed in various civic applications, there is a need to integrate them into efficient and secure communications with the existing infrastructure. In this paper, considering emergency scenarios for intelligent transportation applications, we design a secure hybrid communication infrastructure for mobile road-side units (RSUs) that are based on drones. The architecture tackles interoperability issues when Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC), wireless mesh, and LTE need to coexist for coordination. Specifically, we propose a novel tunneling protocol to integrate LTE with IEEE 802.11s mesh network. In addition, we ensure that only legitimate users can connect and control the mobile RSUs by integrating an authentication framework built on top of the recent OAuth 2.0 standard. A detailed communication protocol is proposed within the elements of the architecture from vehicles to control center for emergency operations. The proposed secure architecture is implemented in ns-3 and tested for its performance under heavy multimedia traffic. The results indicate that the proposed hybrid architecture can enable smooth multimedia traffic delivery via the mobile RSU.