Towards the performance evaluation of a clustering and trust based security mechanism for VANET

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) establish communication between vehicles in order to share safety information about road accidents or traffic jams, or non-safety information through messages. Besides, VANETs have a dynamic topology since the vehicles have a high mobility and therefore, the exchanged messages could be dropped or modified. However, falsified messages can be transmitted, the network performance can be affected. In a previous work, we have proposed a Clustering Mechanism for VANET (CMV) as well as a Trust management based on CMV (TCMV) to secure clustering mechanism for message exchange in the VANET. The CMV is based on two steps: (1) the clusters formation step where clusters are formed and the Cluster Heads are elected, and (2) the clusters maintenance step where the organization of clusters is kept in the presence of velocity when the topology changes in VANET, mainly at the arrival of a new vehicle or the displacement or the failure of a vehicle. Besides, the TCMV is used the reputation values of vehicles to compute the credibility of exchanged message. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the CMV and TCMV. Hence, several simulations were realized with different number of vehicles, velocities and transmission range for the number of formed clusters, the cluster stability status, the Packet Data Ratio (PDR), the reputation of honest and dishonest vehicle, and cases of Trust Message.