Edge-centric trust management in vehicular networks

A major objective of vehicular networking is to improve road safety and reduce traffic congestion. The experience of individual vehicles on traffic conditions and travel situations can be shared with other vehicles for improving their route planning and driving decisions. Nevertheless, the frequent occurrence of adversary vehicles in the network may affect the overall network performance and safety. These vehicles may behave intelligently to avoid detection. To effectively control and monitor such security threats, an efficient Trust Management system should be employed to identify the trustworthiness of individual vehicles and detect malicious drivers which is the major focus of this work. We propose a hybrid solution, which integrates Edge Computing and Multi-agent modeling in a Trust Management system for vehicular networks. The proposed solution also aims to overcome the limitations of the two commonly utilized approaches in this context: cloud computing and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking. Our framework has a set of features that make it an efficient platform to address the major security challenges in vehicular networks including latency, scalability, uncertainty, data accessibility, and malicious behavior detection. Performance of the approach is evaluated by simulating a realistic environment. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms similar approaches from literature for various performance indicators.