Trustworthy Parking Communities: Helping Your Neighbor to Find a Space

Cooperation between vehicles facilitates traffic management, road safety and infotainment applications. Cooperation, however, requires trust in the validity of the received information. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of securely exchanging parking spot availability information. Trust is crucial in order to support the decision of whether the querying vehicle should rely on the received information about free parking spots close to its destination and thus ignore other potentially free spots on the way. Therefore, we propose Parking Communities, which provide a distributed and dynamic means to establish trusted groups of vehicles helping each other to securely find parking in their respective community area. Our approach is based on high-performance state-of-the-art encryption and signature algorithms as well as a well-understood mathematical trust rating model. This approach allows end-to-end encrypted request-response communications in combination with geocast and can be used as an overlay to existing vehicular networking technologies. We provide a comprehensive comparison with other security architectures and simulation results showing the feasibility of our approach.