The pioneering concept of connected vehicles has transformed the way of thinking for researchers and entrepreneurs by collecting relevant data from nearby objects. However, this data is useful for a specific vehicle only. Moreover, vehicles get a high amount of data (e.g., traffic, safety, and multimedia infotainment) on the road. Thus, vehicles expect adequate storage device for this data, but it is infeasible to have a large memory in each vehicle. Hence, the vehicular cloud computing (VCC) framework came into the picture to provide a storage facility by connecting a road-side-unit (RSU) with the vehicular cloud (VC). In this, data should be saved in an encrypted form to preserve security, but there is a challenge to search for information over encrypted data. Next, we understand that many of vehicular communication schemes are inefficient for data transmissions due to its poor performance results and vulnerable to different fundamental security attacks. Accordingly, on-device performance is critical, but data damages and secure on-time connectivity are also significant challenges in a public environment. Therefore, we propose reliable data transmission protocols for cutting-edge architecture to search data from the storage, to resist against various security attacks, and provide better performance results. Thus, the proposed data transmission protocol is useful in diverse smart city applications (business, safety, and entertainment) for the benefits of society. © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.