A Reputation and Security Mechanism for Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks

Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks (HetVNETs) are an evolution of the traditional Vehicular Networks (VANETs) that integrate long-term and short-term communications technologies to deliver strategic services for roads and smart cities (for example, Intelligent Transport, Safety Notification, Multimedia Content, and others). Despite the recent evolution of HetVNETs, points related to security, data integrity and privacy are still open issues, since there is no standard to achieve trust among the network nodes. A promising approach to achieve trust is the usage of a reputation system, that monitors the behavior of network nodes to determine its trustworthiness. However, this de-termination is complex, because the uncertainty coming from the HetVNETs features, such as fast mobile nodes, self-organization, unstable communication links and frequently changing topology. Within this context, this paper presents a reputation system for HetVNETs, called TrustV, to perform a faster and reliable determination of network nodes trustworthiness based on game theory, as well as the long-term and short-term communication technologies of HetVNETs. The game theory approach allows TrustV to overcome the uncertain issues of HetVNETs, since the modeling of the cooperation as a game can identify selfish and malicious nodes during the time. The results suggest that the TrustV achieves a very high cooperation rate between vehicles at Het VNETs, even as it is capable to detect selfish and malicious nodes as well as black hole and grey hole attacks.