A secure road traffic congestion detection and notification concept based on V2I communications

Applying vehicular (V2X) communications in detecting traffic congestion is a promising approach, as smart and self-driving vehicles are equipped with sensors that can be used to detect an incident anywhere in real-time. Unfortunately, without appropriate security measures and careful design the communication can be vulnerable to malicious attacks, causing even more damage on the roads. Addressing these problems, we propose a high-level system architecture and a security protocol specifically designed for congestion detection based on vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) type communication. The security properties of our proposed approach are formally verified using the ProVerif tool, and its efficiency compared to the traditional traffic light systems is demonstrated through simulations with the Veins framework. Results show that our system is secure against a large set of attacks, and can have lower total travelling time compared to three traditional traffic light approaches based on induction loop, lane area detector/camera (installed near the junctions), and static lights.