ATHENA: A Pagerank-based Scheme to Solve the Thundering Herd in Authentication

Vehicles in intelligent transport systems (ITS) react to an emergency situation by broadcasting critical messages like Decentralized Environmental Notification Messages (DENMs). A digital signature is attached to each message to secure the integrity of communication, and this message is inoperative until the authentication completes. This creates a challenge for vehicles to verify massive messages in some scenarios where it could incur the thundering herd in authentication, if there is a critical situation happening in heavy road traffic. To address this problem, we propose ATHENA, a pagerank-based scheme to solve the thundering herd in ITS authentication that utilises the transmission of messages and pagerank algorithm to rank the broadcasting vehicles. Simulation results show the efficiency of ATHENA and the effectiveness of performance enhancements compared with others.