Road-Side Units Based Data Forwarding Framework in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is an emerging new communication technology which has great potential to enhance the safety and comfort of drivers. Security and privacy issues are crucial limits to the adaption of VANETs. In this article, a road-side unit (RSU)-based, privacy-preserving, message-forwarding framework in VANETs is presented. It utilizes the deployment of RSUs to deliver messages to their destinations while preserving communicating parties' privacy. It takes advantage of the high performance capability of RSUs to store and forward messages to their destinations, where these RSUs utilize re-encryption techniques to form a mixed network to provide adequate privacy for senders and receivers. The security analysis results show that the proposed framework can achieve efficient data delivery for many delay-tolerant applications in VANETs.