PPRP: Preserving-Privacy Route Planning Scheme in VANETs

Abstract

Route planning helps a vehicle to share a message with the roadside units (RSUs) on its path in advance, which greatly speeds the authentication between the vehicle and the RSUs when the vehicle enters the RSUs’ coverage. In addition, since only a small amount of necessary information needs to be shared between the vehicle and the RSUs, route planning can reduce the storage overhead of the vehicle’s on-board unit (OBU) and the RSUs. However, the message sharing requires the assistance of the certification authority (CA), which will lead CA easily to obtain the vehicle’s planning route. Although CA knows the vehicle’s registration information and helps the vehicle to communicate with RSUs, it is unacceptable that the path of their vehicle is obtained by CA for most drivers. In fact, vehicle’s sensitive information such as planning route, starting time, stop place, should be privacy for others including CA. Inspired with the method of oblivious transfer, a preserving-privacy route planning scheme in VANETs is proposed in this article, in which, a vehicle deduces the information of RSUs on its path with the help of CA, while CA knows nothing about which RSUs’ information has been deduced by the vehicle. Later, fast authentication or other service is easily achieved between the vehicle and the RSUs (V2R) with the pre-shared information. After V2R authentication, vehicles could easily communicate with adjacent vehicles with the help of RSUs (V2V). Finally, compared with related schemes, performance evaluation illustrates the proposed scheme is better in terms of time consumption.