SE-AOMDV: secure and efficient AOMDV routing protocol for vehicular communications

The Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are emerging networks that provide essential services to drivers on the road. To exchange data, vehicles as network nodes route information between source and destination using the V-to-V infrastructure. To retrieve the best path, routing algorithms are used. We focus in this paper on the Ad hoc On-demand Multipath Distance Vector (AOMDV) routing algorithm, which is able to retrieve at least three paths. Despite, its efficiency for VANET, the AOMDV protocol still faces big challenges in terms of security. Because of the lack of security mechanisms, such as cryptography and intrusion detection, the AOMDV protocol is vulnerable to attacks such as the blackhole and the man in the middle attacks. For this purpose, we propose in this work a secure and efficient AOMDV routing protocol for vehicular communications. The security consists of detecting malicious vehicles that are not authenticated and have malicious behavior. Moreover, to guarantee integrity and authentication of Route REPlay packets that are used to retrieve the best and secure paths. The efficiency consists of node disjuncture for RREP packets. Our algorithm is specific to vehicular networks, because it deploys specific vehicle-based authentication. The performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated using the NS2 and compared to AOMDV and then to SAODV and TS-AOMDV. The results prove that our algorithm is more secure and efficient than AOMDV, especially in terms of average end-to-end delay, for high-speed vehicles. The delay reduction is estimated to 1.5 ms for a speed of 108 km/h, which is promising for vehicular communications.