Secure cooperative communication scheme for vehicular heterogeneous networks

Vehicular Heterogeneous Network (VHN) is a massive network which contains dedicated short range communication (DSRC) based on IEEE 802.11p, Device-to-Device (D2D) communication and cellular network (e.g., 5G). VHN is supposed to complete the interactions of V2X (where X stands for vehicle, road, pedestrian and Internet) and cooperative communications among multiple networks. However, different networks use different communication protocols so that it is hard to implement cooperative communication. Furthermore, due to the openness of wireless channels, communication links are vulnerable to eavesdroppers and cannot guarantee the confidentiality. To deal with these problems, this paper designs an On Board Unit (OBU) with multi-level security. Meanwhile, we implement cooperative communication using designed OBU, for which OBU performs the vertical handoff and selects best mode with consideration of communication requirements. In VHN, we also consider a network model which contains an eavesdropper, and present formulations to describe its specific security problem by utilizing stochastic geometry theory. Thereafter, we propose a secure cooperative communication scheme which uses physical layer security, and explore secrecy-based successful transmission probability as well as transmission capacity. In addition, we propose mode selection and optimization algorithms to improve security of the proposed cooperative communication. Finally, experimental results show that our proposed scheme is feasible and achieves better security than other communication schemes in comparison.