A secure commercial ads dissemination scheme for vehicular networks

In the near future, beacon dissemination base stations will be deployed in shopping mall, supermarkets, stadiums, museums, and theatres to send advertisements offering services and products to the customers with mobile devices. Today, an example of this concept of business model is the Apple's iBeacon. Borrowing this concept from mobile computing, we envision a new opportunity for business modeling using vehicular networks. However, security and privacy issues will compromise the implementation of such models in VANETs. In this work, we focus on the advertisement dissemination using VANETs, in a secure way. To this end, we proposed BUY (BUsiness discoverY) - a scheme which presents the concept of beaconing market using vehicular network. The scheme is based on opportunistic communication and store-carry-and-response mechanism. We evaluated BUY by means of simulations in two different scenarios: highway and urban. The results showed that BUY is very promising for promoting services with a probability that can reach to 1.0 and 0.9 in the highway and urban scenarios respectively.