Anonymous Authentication Protocols for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks: An Overview

According to car crash statistics, over sixmillionmotor vehicle crashes occur onU.S. highways each year. More than 42,000 people are killed in these accidents which injure three million others, and cost more than $230 billion each year. Astonishingly, five people die every hour in these crashes in the United States which is about one death every 12 minutes IVI (2001). In order to alleviate the threats of these crashes and improve the driving experience, car manufactures and the telecommunication industry have made great efforts to equip each vehicle with wireless devices that allow vehicles to communicate with each other as well as with the roadside infrastructure located in critical points of the road, such as intersections or construction sites. Misener (2005); VII (2011). Technologies built on 802.11p and IEEE 1609 standards, 5.9 GHz Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) protocols 1 DSRC (1999), are proposed to support these advanced vehicle safety applications such as secure and effective vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) (also known as Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC)) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications, which are also known as Vehicle Safety Communications (VSC) technologies. As shown in Fig. 1, the wireless communication devices installed on vehicles, also known as onboard units (OBUs), and the roadside units (RSUs), form a self-organized Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) Lin (2008); Sun (2007). Furthermore, the RSUs are connected to the backbone network via the high speed network connections. In this way, VANETs inherently provide a way to collect traffic and road information from vehicles, and to deliver road services including warnings and traffic information to users in the vehicles. Thus, an increasing interest has been raised recently on the VANETs-based applications Bishop (2000), aiming to improve driving safety and traffic management by the method of providing drivers and passengers with Internet access.