DTCF: A Distributed Trust Computing Framework for Vehicular Ad hoc Networks

The concept of trust in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is usually utilized to assess the trustworthiness of the received data as well as that of the sending entities. The quality of safety applications in VANETs largely depends on the trustworthiness of exchanged data. In this paper, we propose a self-organized distributed trust computing framework (DTCF) for VANETs to compute the trustworthiness of each vehicle, in order to filter out malicious nodes and recognize fully trusted nodes. The proposed framework is solely based on the investigation of the direct experience among vehicles without using any recommendation system. A tier-based dissemination technique for data messages is used to filter out non authentic messages and corresponding events before even going farther away from the source of the event. Extensive simulations are conducted using Omnet++/Sumo in order to investigate the efficiency of our framework and the consistency of the computed trust metrics in both urban and highway environments. Despite the high dynamics in such networks, our proposed DTCF is capable of detecting more than 85% of fully trusted vehicles, and filtering out virtually all malicious entities. The resulting average delay to detect malicious vehicles and fraudulent data is showed to be less than 1 second, and the computed trust metrics are shown to be highly consistent throughout the network.