Cooperation-Aware VANET Clouds: Providing Secure Cloud Services to Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Over the last couple of years, traditional VANET (Vehicular Ad Hoc NETwork) evolved into VANET-based clouds. From the VANET standpoint, applications became richer by virtue of the boom in automotive telematics and infotainment technologies. Nevertheless, the research community and industries are concerned about the under-utilization of rich computation, communication, and storage resources in middle and high-end vehicles. This phenomenon became the driving force for the birth of VANET-based clouds. In this paper, we envision a novel application layer of VANET-based clouds based on the cooperation of the moving cars on the road, called CaaS (Cooperation as a Service). CaaS is divided into TIaaS (Traffic Information as a Service), WaaS (Warning as a Service), and IfaaS (Infotainment as a Service). Note, however, that this work focuses only on TIaaS and WaaS. TIaaS provides vehicular nodes, more precisely subscribers, with the fine-grained traffic information constructed by CDM (Cloud Decision Module) as a result of the cooperation of the vehicles on the roads in the form of mobility vectors. On the other hand, WaaS provides subscribers with potential warning messages in case of hazard situations on the road. Communication between the cloud infrastructure and the vehicles is done through GTs (Gateway Terminals), whereas GTs are physically realized through RSUs (Road-Side Units) and vehicles with 4G Internet access. These GTs forward the coarse-grained cooperation from vehicles to cloud and fine-grained traffic information and warnings from cloud to vehicles (subscribers) in a secure, privacy-aware fashion. In our proposed scheme, privacy is conditionally preserved wherein the location and the identity of the cooperators are preserved by leveraging the modified location-based encryption and, in case of any dispute, the node is subject to revocation. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed scheme is the first effort to offshore the extended traffic view construction function and warning messages dissemination function to the cloud.