Performance Evaluation for Secure Communications in Mobile Internet of Vehicles With Joint Reactive Jamming and Eavesdropping Attacks

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is considered to be a backbone of smart transportation system where vehicles are expected to exchange traffic information and other data using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. Furthermore, V2V communications is regarded as a medium to send upcoming traffic information to vehicles/drivers or passengers using wireless technology in a timely manner. This will help reduce traffic accidents, traffic jams, fuel consumption caused by traffic jams, loss of hours caused by delayed commuting and carbon emission caused by vehicles. Because of the critical nature of IoV for smart transportation systems, secure wireless communication is one of the critical and essential components to offer trustworthy services through IoV. Like in other wireless systems, wireless communication is open in air, which makes attackers’ job easy to launch the malicious actions in IoV. In this paper, we investigate the impact of mobility of vehicles for secure communications in IoV with joint jamming and eavesdropping attacks. We investigate different scenarios, when vehicles (legitimate ones and attackers) travel in same and opposite directions with low speed (school zone speed) limit to highway speed limit. Furthermore, we study the impact of association time and encryption time not only for establishing the connection between vehicles for V2V communications but also for exchanging messages for vehicles after successful association between vehicles and encryption of the message. In addition, we also study the joint impact of jamming and eavesdropping attacks in IoV for different speed limits, transmission ranges and wireless bandwidths. We investigate the extra cost in terms of transmit power and bandwidth incurred by jamming and eavesdropping attacks while maintaining the same secrecy rate as it could have been without those attacks. Numerical results are used to support the analysis.