Machine learning based trust management framework for vehicular networks

Establishing security metrics in vehicular networking is still being debated. The dynamic characteristics of vehicular networks, imposes challenges to realize an appropriate solution to organize and ensure reliable data transfer between the vehicular nodes. In order to ensure road safety, avoid/reduce traffic congestion, and to identify malicious vehicles, an efficient Trust Management System has to be implemented in real time scenarios. All existing applications in this area have focused on reliable data exchange and authentication process of vehicular nodes to forward messages. This study proposes a new entity centric trust framework using decision tree classification and artificial neural networks. Decision tree classification model is used to derive rules for trust calculation and artificial neural networks are used to self-train the vehicular nodes, when expected trust value is not met. This model uses multifaceted role and distance based metrics like Euclidean distance to estimate the trust. The proposed entity centric trust model, uses a versatile new direct and recommended trust evaluation strategy to compute trust values. The suggested model is simple, reliable and efficient in comparison to the other popular entity centric trust models. Results and comparative analyses are carried out to prove the better performance of the proposed model over other related approaches.