Cloud-assisted Road Condition Monitoring with Privacy Protection in VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is one of the fastest developing technologies in intelligent transportation systems (ITS), which has made great contributions to improving traffic congestion and reducing traffic accidents. As it is deployed in an open environment, security and privacy are threatened to a certain extent. Moreover, there are huge data exchanges in high traffic areas, which require VANET system to improve computing efficiency while ensuring communication security. To solve the above issues, this paper proposes a cloud-assisted road condition monitoring (RCM) system. The trusted authority (TA) monitors the road conditions with the help of the cloud server. The vehicle collects the road condition information of the road section managed by the roadside unit (RU), and only the vehicles authorized by the administrative roadside unit can successfully upload the road condition reports to the cloud server. The cloud server divides the road condition reports into different equivalence classes, in this way to report the emergency to the TA when the reported quantity exceeds the threshold. Security analysis showed that the proposed RCM system can effectively protect the security and privacy of road condition reports in VANETs.