Secure Group Communications in Vehicular Networks: A Software-Defined Network-Enabled Architecture and Solution

As a means to improve road safety and efficiency and to provide high-performance data transmission service for vehicular networks, group-based vehicular communications (e.g., platoon) has attracted a lot of attention from both academia and industry. In this article, we introduce group-based vehicular communication and address two major security challenges: 1) securely and dynamically setting up and managing the group for a decentralized network, which guarantees the confidentiality and integrity of information being exchanged among vehicles; and 2) secure group access and mobility management for the centralized network, which enables group members to securely and efficiently access the Internet, especially while moving across heterogeneous networks. We propose an integrated network architecture for secure group communication, taking advantage of the software-defined network (SDN) technology in fifth generation (5G) mobile networks.