Real-Time IoV Sensor Monitoring System Using LoRa Communication With USB Key Authorization and AES Security

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) systems are rapidly gaining momentum, exposing vehicular sensor nodes to physical tampering and wireless cyberattacks when deployed in infrastructureless, low-cost configurations. This work presents a real-time IoV sensor monitoring system that emphasises the security of physical sensors and data-acquisition nodes through a USB-based device-access control mechanism combined with lightweight cryptographic protection. The designed system is implemented on a Raspberry Pi-based sensor node with LoRa communication, allowing only authorised USB devices to trigger sensing and transmission operations, thereby preventing unauthorised physical access. For secure long-range wireless communication, the system employs AES-128-GCM authenticated encryption, providing confidentiality, integrity, and replay protection. The proposed architecture was validated using a real-time two-node hardware prototype, and the experimentally obtained performance parameters were further used to scale and evaluate the system up to 100 nodes through MATLAB-based simulation for node-density analysis. Real-time experiments measure encryption and decryption time, one-way communication latency, end-to-end latency, packet delivery ratio, and performance over distances up to 700 m, demonstrating reliable and low-latency secure communication suitable for real-time IoV applications. With acceptable computational overhead and negligible impact on sensor data delivery, the proposed framework provides a practical and scalable model for secure vehicular sensor monitoring in future IoV deployments.