Improved Security Performance for VANET Simulations

:Upcoming deployments of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) in Europe are expected to sign and verify packets secured by cryptographic signatures by default. Thus, when VANET simulations are used for development and test of applications building upon vehicular communication, the overhead induced by security extensions to the ITS-G5 protocol stack shall not be neglected. This paper presents a standard compliant simulation model capable to handle secured messages. Beside its suitability for Hardware-in-the-Loop simulations employing secured communication, the model's major advantage is the minimisation of the simulation environment's performance penalty linked with cryptographic computations.