Design Of A Privacy Aware Routing Protocol For Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

English: the continued growth of the vehicular fleet has opened new business opportunities and new needs of road safety. The constant mobility of individuals and the necessity of staying connected makes studying the possibilities of connectivity and transmission of information between vehicles one of the main objectives of the cars manufacturers. The social costs that accompany this development -increase in accidents, congestion of cities, etc.- increases the needing of improving car safety by providing information on road traffic conditions and also making interesting the study of VANETs (vehicular ad hoc networks) by the authorities and the administration. Anonymity is a key concern in this kind of network, guaranty that the identity of a message sender is protected is an important challenge and might be a mandatory feature for some VANET applications. For this purpose, we introduce Crowd, an anonymity protocol that provides a mechanism for anonymous Web browsing. The main idea behind Crowd anonymity protocol is to hide each user's communications by routing them randomly within a group of similar users. Consequently by using the Crowd protocol neither the receiver nor a corrupt group member or local eavesdropper that observes a message being sent by a particular user can never be sure whether the user is the actual sender, or is simply routing another user's message. The main objective of this PFM is to design and implement an anonymity solution based on the Crowd anonymity protocol to work in a VANET environment, and later on to evaluate QoS and Privacy metrics under this condition. Such evaluation is done by implementing realistic vehicular network scenarios with the network simulator NCTUns and perform different simulations for making a performance evaluation, analyzing packet lost, end-to-end delay and the throughput as a function of the Crowd protocol parameters.