Towards Secure Communication in CR-VANETs Through a Trust-Based Routing Protocol

Abstract

Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) promise efficient spectrum utilization by operating over the unused frequencies where Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) facilitate information exchanging among vehicles to avoid accidents, collisions, congestion, etc. Thus, CR enabled vehicular networks (CR-VANETs), a thriving area in wireless communication research, can be the enabler of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and autonomous driver-less vehicles. Similar to others, efficient and reliable communication in CR-VANETs is vital. Besides, security in such networks may exhibit unique characteristics for overall data transmission performance. For efficient and reliable communication, the proposed routing protocol considers the mobility patterns, spectrum availability, and trustworthiness to be the routing metrics. Hence, the protocol considers the vehicle’s speed, mobility direction, inter-vehicles distance, and node’s reliability to estimate the mobility patterns of a node. Besides, a trust-based reliability factor is also introduced to ensure secure communications by detecting malicious nodes or other external threats. Therefore, the proposed protocol detects malicious nodes by establishing trustworthiness among nodes and preserves security. Simulation is conducted for performance evaluation that shows the proposed routing selects the efficient routing path by discarding malicious nodes from the network and outperforms the existing routing protocols.