An Enhanced Location-Aided Ant Colony Routing for Secure Communication in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

The dynamic characteristics of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) demand reliable and secure communication over wireless media. However, there are significant contradictions in autonomous vehicular systems related to security and privacy. Furthermore, VANETs require seamless data transmission to exchange time-critical data about accidents and traffic. Therefore, VANETs require secure seamless data transmission mechanisms to provide secure reliable communication without communication interruption to exchange time-critical data between vehicles. This paper proposes an Enhanced Location-Aided Ant colony Routing (ELAACR) for VANETs to achieve seamless secure data transmission. The proposed ELAACR is a two-fold scheme in which Phase 1 implements Location-Aided Key Management (LAKM) and Phase 2 implements Ant Colony Routing (ACR). An ACR combined with an LAKM pattern for offering secure and reliable communication. The LAKM scheme works based on the group signature concept to construct a secure network, and an ACR is used to find an efficient secure shortest path for seamless data transmission. The proposed work is simulated in Network Simulator (NS 2.35). By using an efficient and secure shortest path with secure seamless data transmission, the proposed ELAACR achieves an average throughput (T) of 640 Kbps, packet loss rate (PLR) of 0.018%, packet delivery ratio (PDR) of 98.5%, overhead (OH) of 0.157%, and 0.16 s end-to-end delay (EED) compared to Enhanced Hybrid Ant Colony Optimization Routing Protocol (EHACORP) and Fuzzy Based Ant Colony Optimization (F-ANT). The simulation results show that the proposed ELAACR registers better performance in all aspects compared to the existing EHACORP and F-ANT.