Intermittent jamming for eavesdropping defense in WAVE based vehicular networks

Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) based vehicular networking has been considered as a promising technology to improve road safety and provide diverse value-added services. However, it is vulnerable to eavesdropping attacks due to the broadcasting nature of wireless communications. Eavesdropping in WAVE based vehicular network can reveal drivers' private and can be taken as preamble to other critical attacks resulting in severe threats to drivers' personal safety and property safety. In this paper, we deal with this threat by proposing an intermittent jamming (IJ) based eavesdropping defense mechanism. The optimal IJ scheme is found by solving the problem of minimizing the jamming energy cost while disabling the eavesdropping activities. The practicability of the design is ensured by considering the network specific communication properties. Numerical analysis is conducted to investigate the relationship between the optimal IJ scheme and the network scenario. Simulation study is carried out to compare the performance of our design with that of the existing continuous jamming (CJ) based scheme. The results indicate that comparing with the CJ scheme, our design uses less energy to disable eavesdropping. IJ saves more than 34% energy while achieving an average packet error rate (PER) of 87.42% at the eavesdropper, and saves more than 22% energy while achieving an average PER of 94.95% at the eavesdropper. (c) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.