Implementation and performance evaluation of a payment protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are envisioned to support the development of a wide range of attractive applications such as payment services which require the design of payment systems that satisfy additional requirements associated with VANETs. The wide range of scenarios (with or without connectivity restriction) arising from vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside communications have opened up new security challenges which must be considered by payment system designers to achieve the same security capabilities independent of the scenario where payment occurs. We propose and implement a new payment protocol (called KCMS-VAN protocol) for those scenarios where the client cannot communicate directly with the credit card issuer (the client's financial institution) for authentication. Our proposed protocol uses symmetric-key operations which require low computational power and can be processed much faster than asymmetric ones. We also present a performance evaluation of the proposed payment protocol and the results obtained demonstrate that optimal performance can be achieved with it.