A cluster-based routing method with authentication capability in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs)

Routing is challenging in vehicular ad hoc networks due to their features, such as high mobility of nodes and unstable wireless communication links. Therefore, it is an interesting issue for researchers. In addition, it is very important to design an authentication mechanism between the source node and the destination node because these networks are exposed to many attacks due to their features mentioned above. In this paper, we present a fuzzy logic-based routing method with authentication capability in vehicular ad hoc networks. The proposed routing method has three phases: clustering phase, routing phase between cluster head nodes, and authentication phase. In the first phase, vehicles are clustered using an efficient scheme. In the proposed method, we define two types of data packets: immediate and ordinary. Various data packets have different route discovery processes that are described in Phase 2. Note that any data packet type is divided into two groups: simple and secure. Simple data packets have no authentication mechanism. On the other hand, secure data packets use an authentication mechanism based on message authentication code (MAC) and symmetric key cryptography. We simulate the proposed method using NS2. Simulation results are compared with three routing protocols including, AODV, , and 3VSR. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms others in terms of end-to-end delay, packet collision, packet delivery rate (PDR), packet loss rate (PLR), and throughput. However, it increases the routing overhead slightly.