The vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is used for communication between vehicles in the same vicinity and road-side-units (RSUs). Since they communicate over a public channel, a secure data transmission protocol is necessary to exchange confidential information. Moreover, the number of vehicles is increasing day-by-day and thus, the receiver gets myriad messages from nearby RSUs and vehicles. As a result, the verification time plays a major role in vehicular communication scheme. Further, providing anonymous communication between vehicles is also a challenging task. To overcome these concerns, in this paper, we propose an identity-based signature protocol using the batch verification concept for VANETs. This paper aims to decrease the computational time (during the communication), and the proposed scheme resists various security attacks, i.e., man-in-the-middle, impersonation, replay, Sybil, and password guessing. Moreover, the proposed protocol achieves better performance results (for computational time, communication overhead, and storage cost) on Raspberry Pi 3B+ compared to other existing data transmission schemes. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.