Channel-aware ECDSA signature verification of basic safety messages with K-means clustering in VANETs

Abstract

Vehicular ad hoc network facilitates cooperative awareness applications by periodically sharing basic safety messages (BSMs) with the neighborhood vehicles. As these applications impact human safety, authenticity of BSMs is a key requirement, which however is a challenging task in a dense traffic density where many BSMs are queued up simultaneously for signature verification. As a result, many important BSMs from nearby vehicles may experience significantly long signature verification delays. To overcome this problem, we propose a channel aware signature verification scheme that prioritizes the BSMs from the closer neighbors with the help of a multi-level security queue. The BSM to security queue mapping is done by a k-means clustering based classification algorithm that takes into account the received signal strengths and application dependent safety areas. Simulation results verify the performance enhancement achieved by the proposed framework in terms of several safety awareness metrics as compared with the existing schemes.