Vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) plays a vital role in emerging Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). VANET’s deal with the group of network that are designed in ad-hoc model in which various moving devices and other stationary linking objects that are connected over a wireless manner which interchange effective data to each other. Since, the communication between the VANET and other communication devices take place in open channel, there exist many threats caused by the intruder. Moreover, most of the existing authentication schemes suffer from computational and communicational overhead. In order to provide efficient lightweight authentication with enhanced privacy. In this paper, a novel lightweight authentication protocol named as Lightweight Authentication Protocol with Enhanced Privacy (LAPEP) has been proposed to provide efficient end to end security in VANET. The proposed protocol employs Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) along with Bilinear pairing for efficient generation of keys and provides secured multiparty key exchange. Moreover, the security analysis of the proposed scheme is carried out by Burrows Abadi Needham (BAN) logic. The advantages of the proposed system are reduction of computation overhead and provide resistance to various security attacks during data transmission. Moreover, the proposed system enhances the Quality of Service (QoS) namely latency, overhead, delivery ratio, loss ratio and delay rate. The implementation of the proposed protocol is carried out in NS3 simulator. The simulation result proves that the proposed protocol improves the computational cost by 42.85%, communication cost by 35.82%, message end to end delay by 30.65%, signing time by 25.45% and verification time by 32.45%.