A Robust Eco-Routing Protocol against Malicious Data in Vehicular Networks

Abstract

Vehicular networks have a diverse range of applications that vary from safety, to traffic management and comfort. Vehicular communications (VC) can assist in the ecorouting of vehicles in order to reduce the overall mileage and CO2 emissions by the exchange of data among vehicle-entities. However, the trustworthiness of these data is crucial as false information can heavily affect the performance of applications. Hence, the devising of mechanisms that reassure the integrity of the exchanged data is of utmost importance. In this article we investigate how tweaked information originating from malicious nodes can affect the performance of a real time eco-routing mechanism that uses Dedicated Short Ranged Communications (DSRC), namely Erou Ve. We improve the routing decision mechanism of the original algorithm and also develop and evaluate defense mechanisms that exploit vehicular communications in order to filter out tweaked data. We prove that our proposed mechanisms can restore the performance of the Erou Ve to near its optimal operation and can be used as a basis for protecting other similar traffic management systems.