Implementation of MAC protocol with enhanced security features in VANET

Abstract

Vehicular Area Network (VANET) is essential to reduce road accidents and to efficiently control large numbers of vehicles on the highways. Methods of establishing secure connection between vehicular nodes present in a VANET is the first priority of researchers, numbers of protocols have being developed and implemented for the same. There is still a lot of scope for refinement in the currently implemented protocols. The most prominent issue is packet drop due to unsynchronised packet transmission, which results in delay and collision in the VANET. Apart from packet drop, authenticity of packets is also an important issue. This paper analyses security issues in VANET and proposes a secure MAC protocol. Four salient features of the proposed protocol are: (i) automatic size adjustment of contention window according to network capacity, (ii) channel allocation for each node based on TDMA and SDMA, (iii) priority assigning for each type of messages, and (iv) security checking for each packet using CRC.