The vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is a significant platform for smart transportation in which vehicles and road-side-units (RSUs) publicly transmit important information with each other on the road. Thus, receivers should generally confirm the sender and data before considering obtained data. Therefore, researchers suggested different vehicular communication schemes to transfer data on the road, but most of these schemes are vulnerable to crucial security attacks, and they are not efficient for vehicular communications due to high computational cost and communication overhead. To overcome security and performance issues, we propose an effective vehicle-to-RSU data transmission scheme using the one-way hash function to exchange meaningful data securely. Further, we do security and performance analysis of the proposed method and do the comparison with other relevant communication schemes. Moreover, the suggested method resists to various security attacks, and it performs better in storage requirement, communication cost, experimental time, and energy consumption compared to other relevant data transmission methods. © 2019 Elsevier B.V.