A Group Based Key Sharing and Management Algorithm for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are one special type of ad hoc networks that involves vehicles on roads. Typically like ad hoc networks, broadcast approach is used for data dissemination. Blind broadcast to each and every node results in exchange of useless and irrelevant messages and hence creates an overhead. Unicasting is not preferred in ad-hoc networks due to the dynamic topology and the resource requirements as compared to broadcasting. Simple broadcasting techniques create several problems on privacy, disturbance, and resource utilization. In this paper, we propose media mixing algorithm to decide what information should be provided to each user and how to provide such information. Results obtained through simulation show that fewer number of keys are needed to share compared to simple broadcasting. Privacy is also enhanced through this approach.