Robust adaptive multi-strategy routing in heterogeneous VANETs amidst dynamic adversarial conditions

Abstract Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) is a very basic form of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), which enables the information exchange in real time among heterogeneous entities that includes vehicles, roadside units (RSUs), basic pedestrians, and also emergency vehicles. However, the open wireless medium, high node mobility, and absence of centralized infrastructure make VANETs highly susceptible to routing attacks such as blackhole attacks, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, and node impersonation. Existing approaches largely assume static adversarial models and homogeneous network composition, limiting their practical applicability in dynamic road environments. This paper proposes a secure multi-strategy adaptive routing framework for heterogeneous VANET environments under dynamic adversarial conditions. The framework models the road network as an undirected dynamic graph derived from the California road network dataset (roadNet-CA) obtained from the Stanford Network Analysis Project (SNAP) repository. Node heterogeneity explicitly includes classification of network by having four different types that is RSU, vehicles, Pedestrians and also emergency vehicles. This uses a degree centrality-based assignment. The framework employs a mutual authentication mechanism that is having prior route which is defined and will be followed by a multi strategy secure routing engine. This mechanism evaluates by using four path strategies: Direct Avoidance, K-Shortest Path, Weighted Random Routing, and Node-Disjoint Routing. The proposed dynamic routing mechanism continuously monitors all the possible active path and then it tries to trigger and ensure the re-compute is done where the attacker is present. While doing the same analysis and computation we understand that the packet delivery ratio has improved and also there is a lot of energy saving. This method ensures to have reduced delay end to end and final stage the through was also compared the proposed method higher throughput.