Zone-based stable and secure clustering technique for VANETs

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is a pivotal element of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) and has gained significant attention in both academia as well as in the industry. The driving experience has been improved with the deployment of VANETs in the transportation system. In this scenario, accurate real-time traffic information is required to be forwarded to the correlated vehicles using Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication. The V2V system is prone to the issue of communication overhead and security, whereas the V2I-based model for data dissemination faces the issue of scalability. In addition to this, wireless communication among vehicles is affected by potential attackers, that not only threaten the vehicle's security but also the commuter's life. An impersonation attack is considered the most common and dangerous attack in VANETs. In this paper, we propose a hybrid system that utilizes both V2V and V2I communications for secure data dissemination in urban scenarios. We use a zone-based stable and secure clustering mechanism to identify Cluster Heads (CH) as a message forwarding node to and from the Road Side Unit (RSU), which reduces the communication overhead and latency of the network. We utilize the concept of Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) and the monitoring mode of RSU for the detection and mitigation of impersonation attacks in VANETs. Finally, we validate our results using a network simulator (NS2).