Adaptive multimedia data forwarding for privacy preservation in vehicular ad-hoc networks

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) have drawn much attention of researchers. The vehicles in VANETs frequently join and leave the networks, and therefore restructure the network dynamically and automatically. Forwarded messages in vehicular ad-hoc networks are primarily multimedia data, including structured data, plain text, sound, and video, which require access control with efficient privacy preservation. Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is adopted to meet the requirements. However, solutions based on traditional CP-ABE suffer from challenges of the limited computational resources on-board units equipped in the vehicles, especially for the complex policies of encryption and decryption. In this paper, we propose a CP-ABE delegation scheme, which allows road side units (RSUs) to perform most of the computation, for the purpose of improving the decryption efficiency of the vehicles. By using decision tree to jointly optimize multiple factors, such as the distance from RSU, the communication and computational cost, the CP-ABE delegation scheme is adaptively activated based on the estimation of various vehicles decryption overhead. Experimental results thoroughly demonstrate that our scheme is effective and efficient for multimedia data forwarding in vehicular ad-hoc networks with privacy preservation.