Analyzing dissemination redundancy to achieve data consistency in VANETs

It is generally agreed that VANET security needs to rely on entity-centric trust, as well as data-centric methods. Entity-centric trust typically involves signatures and certificates, while data-centric methods leverage on consistency checks. One way to implement data consistency checking is to exploit redundant information dissemination to detect inconsistencies. In this paper, we propose a metric to investigate the degree of redundancy that different types of information dissemination protocols exhibit. We evaluate our metric using simulations of Geocast and aggregation protocols. Results show that geocast largely eliminates redundancy, whereas aggregation keeps more redundant communication paths.