PISTON: PUF-Integrated Secure, Throughput-Optimized Network Protocol for IoV

This research introduces PISTON, a novel protocol designed to enhance the security, efficiency, and performance of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) networks. PISTON integrates advanced authentication mechanisms utilizing Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and multifactor authentication with dynamic challenges and zero-knowledge proof-based authentication to ensure robust security and mitigate various cyber threats, including Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. The protocol further incorporates sleep-wake scheduling, priority-based scheduling, and adaptive modulation and coding to optimize network performance. The communication overhead in PISTON is derived through a formula that incorporates latency, energy consumption, and throughput, demonstrating the protocol’s efficiency in dynamic vehicular environments. Comparative analysis against existing protocols highlights PISTON’s superiority in seamless handover, provable security, and DoS attack resilience. Experimental results show that PISTON reduces energy consumption by 30% and achieves 20% higher data throughput while maintaining low latency, essential for real-time IoV applications. The empirical findings underscore PISTON’s advancements in establishing a new benchmark for future IoV deployments, ensuring secure, energy-efficient, low-latency, and high-throughput communication.