Multi-Constraints Analytic Hierarchy Process Clustering Driven Crypto-Blockchain Security Interface for QoS-Adaptive Communication in VANETs: MCAHP-CB

Abstract

– In the last few years vehicular communication technology has gained widespread attention to serve applications like smart transportation, inter and intra-vehicular communications, etc. Vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is playing decisive role in smart transportation in urban setups, where the ability to perform inter-vehicular communication broadens horizon for run-time traffic management, path-routing and driver data exchange for the dynamic decisions. Despite this, addressing exceedingly high topological changes, link-vulnerability, node’s dynamics and intrusion possibility remain challenge for VANET’s realization. Most of the state -of-art solutions either focus on VANET’s routing or transmission security and there exists no potential solution which could consider them together to meet quality-of-service (QoS) communication demands. With this motive, this research proposed multi-constraints analytic hierarchy process clustering driven crypto-blockchain security interface for QoS-adaptive communication in VANETs (MCAHP-CB). As the name indicates MCAHP-CB protocol emphasizes on both routing reliability as well as transmission security to meet run-time demands in scalable VANETs. The MCAHP-CB protocol at first performs Euclidian distance-based k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) clustering to group the vehicular nodes, which is followed by multi-constraints analytic hierarchy process (MCAHP) driven CH selection and best forwarding route selection in multi-hop transmission. Unlike traditional standalone node parameter’s driven CH selection methods, the MCAHP method exploits multiple one-hop distance node’s information including packet delivery rate (PDR), average energy, link quality, trust factor to perform CH selection. Being an AHP weighted CH selection method, MCAHP protocol assigned network adaptive weights to the different node parameters to select CH, which were later applied to perform best forwarding path selection in scalable VANET. To ensure transmission security, the proposed protocol applies an advanced encryption standard (AES)-blockchain interface, where the earlier encrypts the connected node’s (say, vehicular sensors) packet information, while blockchain module exploits node’s trust value factor (TVF) to detect malicious node and isolate them from network formation. Additionally, the public blockchain technique with its TVF-sensitive validator and block generator node identification ability transmits block cipher data secretly across the network. As overall security solution, AES-256 encrypts the transactions for secure transmission, while blockchain guarantees attack-resilient transmission within the network to meet VANET demands. Thus, the strategic amalgamation of the MCAHP-CP protocol improves routing efficiency as well as transmission reliability to meet QoS-adaptive transmission in VANET. Simulations confirm affirmative performance in terms of higher PDR (98.77%), low PLR (1.23%), low energy consumption (321.01 𝐦𝐉 ), high throughput (44.97 Mbps), and low delay (260.17 𝐦𝐬 ), which makes its suitable for run-time VANET demands.