A Hybrid Trust Management Heuristic for VANETs

State-of-the-art advances in vehicular communication have fostered the development of smart mobility platforms, where moving vehicles exchange safety-critical information with minimal latency, to improve passenger and pedestrian safety. It is, therefore, of paramount importance that the information that is exchanged is not only authentic, but its sender should be trustworthy. Consequently, incorrect information needs to be detected as such, and its source needs to be flagged as untrustworthy if it consistently sends incorrect information. In the case of highly dynamic vehicular networks, ignoring trustworthiness poses a serious threat to vehicular communications, especially if there is a chance that the malicious vehicle could be elected as the cluster head of other vehicles within a group. We propose a hybrid trust management scheme to identify such malicious vehicles and to inhibit them from being elected as the cluster head. The scheme encompasses a composite metric (i.e., trust values assigned to the vehicles coupled with their resource availability) for cluster head and proxy cluster head selection via intermittent elections. This approach helps to form trustworthy and resource efficient vehicular networks. Simulations of the proposed scheme have been conducted using MATLAB and are also presented in this manuscript.