A distributed reputation scheme for situation awareness in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs)

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) enhance road safety by frequently exchanging real-time data about road conditions through wireless sensor nodes. This exchange allows vehicles to detect potential hazards by sharing information about their location and speed. As vehicles communicate, there is need for a mechanism to verify the trustworthiness of messages that are sent in the network. This paper proposes a reputation model that aids vehicles in a road network to evaluate the reliability of their peers. In this scheme, each receiving vehicle requests other vehicles within its communication range to give their opinion about the trustworthiness of the sending vehicle. Alternatively, the receiving vehicle gets opinion about the sending vehicle from the Road Side Unit (RSU). The scheme applies conditional probability to identify malevolent peers. We present an algorithm for the proposed model and perform simulations to validate our work. Simulation results demonstrate that on average, the proposed scheme achieves a 90% accuracy in detecting malicious messages. The scheme is also scalable.