Efficient Secure Data Clustering In Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Over the last few years, Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have emerged as a new class of efficient information dissemination technology among communities of users mainly because of their wide range of applications in different domains such as safety applications, healthcare, data dissemination and online entertainment. Vehicles in VANETs act as intelligent machines to provide various resources to the end users with/without the aid of the existing infrastructure. The development of dedicated standards used for communication such as DSRC and WAVE have resulted in designing an Intelligent Transport System (ITS) which offers a number of promising solutions for efficient traffic management to increase passenger safety. However, future ITS solutions may require enhanced and robust message delivery solutions due to the high mobility and varying density of vehicles on the road. The availability of limited communication resources due to high mobility and uneven distribution of vehicles in VANETs makes it difficult for the vehicles to maintain end-to-end connection for timely delivery of messages. Clustering can be one of the viable solutions to solve the aforementioned problem to have a better network throughput. It is grouping of the vehicles based upon metrics such as density, velocity and geographical locations of vehicles. But, there are number of challenges that needs to be addressed for designing an efficient solution for clustering. Most of the existing solutions reported in the literature use a combination of parameters to depict driver behavior for an optimized message delivery. But in these solutions, due to large number of nodes and lack of routers, a flat network scheme may cause serious scalability and hidden terminal problems. Vehicles require additional infrastructure like a GPS, transceivers, Lane Detection System, Digital maps, RSU s, odometer etc. for cluster formation and maintenance.