Reliable data exchange in vehicular delay tolerant networks using AI‐based hybrid trust management

Delay-tolerant networking (DTN) is an architecture to enable data communications between isolated or remote regions, where long delays and intermittent connectivity can be tolerated. An emerging class of DTN, called vehicular DTNs (VDTN), exploits transportation systems as the transport layer to transfer data. In these networks, vehicles (e.g., busses, boats, trains) act as mobile nodes and carry data messages around. Mobile nodes can exchange data messages using devices called relay nodes. Relay nodes, placed in strategic positions along vehicle routes, have the capability to download, store, and upload the data messages from/to the mobile nodes. An important issue in VDTN is the optimal placement of the relay nodes such that delay-tolerant connectivity in VDTN is ensured at minimum cost. In this paper we show that the problem of optimal relay node placement is an NP-hard problem. Other contributions of this paper are the formulation of the relay node placement problem using ILP and the proposal of heuristic algorithms solving the optimization problem. Using simulation results, we compare the performance of each algorithm under different network constraints, such as node storage capability and network topology.

The rapid growth of the ITS (intelligent transport system) development requires us to realize new kinds of applications, such as the winter road surveillance system. However, it is still necessary to consider the network difficulty areas for LTE (long-term evolution) or 3G transmissions when one visits sightseeing spots such as ski resorts or spas in mountain areas. Therefore, this paper proposes a winter road surveillance system in the local area based on vehicular delay-tolerant networks. The adaptive array antenna controlled by image recognition with the Kalman filter algorithm is proposed as well to the system in order to realize higher delivery rates. The implementations of the prototype system are presented in this paper as well, and the effectivity of the radio transmission in the prototype system is realized by vehicular image recognition methods and the asynchronous voltage controls for antenna elements for the rapid directional controls of the radio transmission. The experimental results showed that the radio directional controls by the prototype system for the target vehicle can proceed within one second, and that the simulation with the GIS (geographic information system) map pointed out the delivery rates of the proposed method—which are better than those of the epidemic DTN (delay-tolerant networking) routing by the nondirectional antenna. The experiments of the proposed methods indicate a higher efficiency of the data transmissions—even in the mountain area. Furthermore, future research subjects are discussed in this paper.

The development of Internet of Things (IoT) has paved way for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are indispensable for ITS with intelligent vehicles (IV) as their key players. To ensure proper and reliable VANET operation, IVs need secure inter- and intra-network communication with trust and reliability of data (provenance). This paper aims to provide trust management in VANETs by proposing a trustless system model using blockchain and a certificate authority (CA) for registering IVs as well as revoking their registration if need be. Furthermore, to preserve data reliability, this paper uses physical unclonable functions (PUFs). Implementation of DrivMan shows that it is able to establish distributed trust management and enables secure data sharing while preserving the privacy of IVs.

In the vehicular delay-tolerant networks, (VDTN) association between the sources to the destination is not always achievable at any required period. Consequently, the carrier node saves the message in its intrinsic buffer until an opportunity occurs for forwarding. Fix nodes facilitate in message storage and message relaying. It also helps in improving the performance of VDTN. Considering the mobility of nodes, the bit error rate is high whereas the bit error rate in fixed nodes is comparatively low. In VDTN, bit error rate is not considered in most of the routing schemes. In this article, a composite routing approach is introduced to conquer aforementioned issues. Some features of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) are associated to PRoPHET routing protocol for VDTN. The propagation models of VANET are executed for mobile node communication and without it for VDTN. The effect of environmental hindrance is also considered, and this can be either positive or negative. This makes the composite routing approach two-dimensional and much competent. The simulation and performance analysis of the composite approach is done via opportunistic network environment (ONE) simulator. Results show that the composite routing approach outperforms the PRoPHET wrt. delivery ratio and average delivery delay.

Trust management is an important issue in a grid environment where consumers and service providers are distributed geographically across autonomous administrative domains. In this paper, we propose a reputation-based trust management architecture that supports the choice of service providers (SPs) based on their trust values available on the fly through the intermediaries, brokers. This architecture insists on multiple brokers in each domain. The entities (consumers and the SPs) are distributed across these brokers, with each of these entities being associated with more than one broker. This improves the redundancy of information maintained at the broker sites, thereby improving the reliability. This also eases the network traffic at the broker sites while handling consumer requests and feedbacks. The issues rising out of such an arrangement of multiple brokers, namely the distribution of entities among the brokers and maintenance of consistency of information across the brokers, are addressed well in this paper. Trust values of SPs and consumers are evaluated and updated dynamically after the completion of each transaction. This enables the consumer to receive the response from the broker significantly quicker compared to other reputation-based-trust models where the trust values are computed at the request-time. Trust parameters such as the number of transactions, satisfaction-value, and cost of transaction, criticality of transaction, different weights for direct and indirect transactions and different weights for past and recent transactions are considered for the trust evaluation. This model shows a marked improvement in reduction of the cost-loss to the consumer community and reduction in the waiting time for handling the consumer's requests over other models which operate without trust and with trust computed at the request-time. The impact of broker's feedback on the computation of trust values is also presented.

A mobile ad-hoc network is an autonomous system having collection of mobile nodes connected by wireless links. Mobile nodes in a MANET communicate with each other based on unconditional cooperation and inherited trustworthiness. MANET is vulnerable due to the characteristics such as dynamic topology and openness. This leads to the exploitation of MANET by performing various kinds of attacks by the presence of malicious and (or) selfish nodes. Such nodes affect the normal routing process in a MANET thereby impacting the routing performances such as packet delivery ratio. Hence, the necessity of trust factor between communication nodes is substantiated. In this paper the proposed solution identifies the malicious and selfish behaviour of nodes by dynamic calculation of trust and energy values of the nodes in the topology. The proposed algorithm, Trust and Energy based Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector improves the traditional AODV algorithm by the dynamic incorporation of trust and energy values for each node in the topology in order to achieve cooperative routing. In Trust and Energy based Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector, the source node selects the cooperative path rather than the shortest path thereby isolating the malicious and selfish nodes. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed Trust and Energy based Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector routing algorithm isolate the malicious and selfish nodes, and substantially improves the routing performance such as packet delivery ratio and average end to end latency.

A Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is a self-organized system comprised of mobile wireless nodes. It does not have centralized administration. So MANETs in open environment, easily attacked by malicious nodes because any node can join at any time in the network. AODV is a most traditional routing protocol used for MANET, which selects the shortest path for routing and it affects the data communication if any malicious node present in the shortest path. Proposed model uses the combination of trust and energy value based routing protocol called Energy and Trust Based AODV routing protocol (ET-AODV) to establish a most trusted routes by providing modification to AODV protocol. In proposed technique each node estimates its neighbor's trust value and energy value that is one node has for another node during communication dynamically. Adding trust value and energy value new root value is calculated and maintained in every neighbor table. Using root value trusted routes are established by two methods that are single value routing and multiple value routing and isolate the malicious nodes from the network. This technique only considers the black hole attack which can easily interrupt the communication path. Experimental results shows that the ET-AODV routing protocol is able to achieve an improvement in packet delivery ratios rather than AODV.

The rapid development and increasing popularity of mobile devices have facilitated the development of computation‐intensive applications and services, but their constrained compute, storage and battery capabilities have also created the requirements for optimized resource provision and service orchestration. Emerging mobile edge computing (MEC) and next‐generation networks (6G) can meet these requirements of mobile devices by migrating complex computing tasks and large volumes of data to edge servers with acceptable latency, thus effectively enhancing the quality of experience (QoE) of mobile users. Intelligent Vehicular Collaboration, as an intelligent mobile application or service in intelligent connected vehicle (ICV) applications, enables precise and effective driving decisions based on a large amount of real‐time traffic information statistics and intelligent analysis of vehicle status to improve the user driving experience and the efficiency of intelligent transportation systems(ITS). However, the openness and dynamics of wireless communications and the high frequency of information interaction of MEC‐enabled intelligent vehicular collaboration services in the 6G era make them highly vulnerable to cyber attacks. How to achieve dynamically trustworthy, secure, and intelligent vehicular collaboration services in the presence of malicious node access and cyber attacks in the 6G MEC‐enabled vehicular network is a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain‐enabled trust management mechanism to address this challenge. First, we design a spatiotemporal‐correlated message credibility assessment method and a dynamic mutual trust evaluation method to obtain accurate ratings for messages and mobile nodes respectively. Based on the above methods, we propose an improved blockchain‐based intelligent trust management mechanism that enables transparent, tamper‐evident, and trustworthy secure intelligent vehicular collaboration services while maintaining stable and efficient system performance. Simulation results show that our suggested solutions can efficiently evaluate the trust level of ICVs and achieve efficient and secure intelligent vehicular collaboration with acceptable communication and computation overheads.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms are gaining increasing popularity due to their scalability, robustness and self-organization. In P2P systems, peers interact directly with each other to share resources or exchange services without a central authority to manage the interaction. However, these features expose P2P platforms to malicious attacks that reduce the level of trust between peers and in extreme situations, may cause the entire system to shut down. Therefore, it is essential to employ a trust management system that establishes trust relationships among peers. Current P2P trust management systems use binary categorization to classify peers as trustworthy or not trustworthy. However, in the real world, trustworthiness is a vague concept; peers have different levels of trustworthiness that affect their overall trust value. Therefore, in this paper, we developed a novel trust management algorithm for P2P platforms based on Hadith science where Hadiths are systematically classified into multiple levels of trustworthiness, based on the quality of narrator and content. To benchmark our proposed system, HadithTrust, we used two state-of-art trust management systems, EigenTrust and InterTrust, with no-trust algorithm as a baseline scenario. Various experimental results demonstrated the superiority of HadithTrust considering eight performance measures.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming systems rely on that peers voluntarily share their bandwidth to maintain high performance. Credit-based incentive mechanisms are widely used to encourage peers to share more bandwidth. However, in credit-based mechanisms, how to set a suitable bandwidth price is a critical issue. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic bandwidth pricing mechanism based on Stackelberg game and trust management. This mechanism can dynamically adjust the bandwidth price based on peers' trust values: the lower trust a peer has, the higher price the peer pays. A Stackelberg game is formulated to obtain peers' optimal bandwidth pricing and purchasing strategies. Through mathematical analysis, we derive the equilibrium of our proposed game and an algorithm to obtain equilibrium is also proposed. Extensive simulations show that our proposed mechanism can effectively induce peers to share more bandwidth, maintain system fairness and defend typical data pollution attack to guarantee the robustness of the system.

Vehicular networks can facilitate a set of new different services such as automated payments, security alerts, commerce, infotainment, etc., so they are relevant in the context of Intelligent Transportation Systems as well as in the context of Smart Cities. However, due to the harsh conditions in which they are developed, for example nodes moving at very high speeds, end-to-end communication is not always possible, so communication under traditional network schemes is not feasible. Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks are an extension of Delay-Tolerant Networks in which vehicles are the main agents in the communication process, and they make possible communication even when no end-to-end links are available in the network. In such kind of networks, alternative paths and packet distribution schemes are necessary. Hence, the analysis of dissemination algorithms is important as it provides insight of alternatives to ensure message delivery. In this paper we show how in heterogeneous environments the use of different conditions can lead to an increase in packet delivery ratio under simple epidemic spreading, one of the most used dissemination schemes.

Vehicular Ad-hoc networks (VANETs) have been around for some time and are still attracting research. VANETs are one of the ad hoc networks real-life applications, where vehicles communicate which each other and with fixed components known as roadside units. VANETs have unique characteristics and requirements which differ from those in standard ad-hoc networks, but the security remains a major challenge because of the very dynamic topology and the lack of infrastructure. In this autonomous and auto-organized environment, the question of whom to trust and for what becomes very important and difficult to answer. This paper addresses the issues associated with establishing trust between peers in VANET. It defines, discusses and evaluates various trust management approaches and how well they address VANET requirements. The paper also proposes criteria for assessing the effectiveness of trust management models with regards to challenges specific to VANETs.

Opportunistic networks are usually formed spontaneously by mobile devices equipped with short range wireless communication interfaces. The idea is that an end-to-end connection may never be present. Designing and implementing a routing protocol to support both service discovery and delivery in such kinds of networks is a challenging problem on account of frequent disconnections and topology changes. In this network one of the most important issues relies on the selection of the best intermediate node to forward the messages towards the destination. This paper presents a trust framework for opportunistic network where the nodes in the network follow the trace based mobility model. The selection of next hop to forward the data packets is based on the trust value as well as the direction of movement of node towards the destination. The trust value is obtained from the trust framework of the data forwarding node. The direction of destination is obtained from the movement trace file that is maintained by the nodes in the network. In this proposed framework, the message is encrypted to secure both the data and path information. The effectiveness of this proposed framework is shown using simulation.

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), with modern sensors and sensor-based devices, will significantly stimulate the development of context-aware applications. An effective means to extract higher-level contextual information from sensor data is distributed complex event processing (CEP), which facilitates the analysis of real-time data streams coming from heterogeneous and distributed sources. Considering that user context is inherently sensitive information, the preservation of privacy is critical once the processing of user context takes place over several (possibly malicious) devices, especially in collaborative scenarios. In this paper, we tackle this issue by introducing a trust-based approach for the placement and execution of CEP operators in a distributed environment. We propose a trust management model based on communication interactions among the users. Furthermore, we incorporate trust recommendations using a cosine-based similarity check in order to overcome collusion and on-off attacks. We developed a smartphone-based distributed CEP system called TrustCEP to evaluate our approach for trust management. Based on the evaluation of TrustCEP, we observe that our approach induces a minimal increase in average battery consumption compared to privacy-negligent approaches.

Trust management can help vehicles judge whether the received messages are reliable and identify malicious nodes in the network. To solve the problem that the current trust model fails to select appropriate recommendation nodes and dynamically adjust the weight of recommendation trust according to the environment, this paper proposes a trust model based on recommendation value filtering based on the topology structure of the Internet of Vehicles. The model is divided into three layers: local trust management, cluster trust management and global trust management. The three concepts of time decay function, sliding window mechanism and penalty factor are introduced to calculate the direct trust value, which effectively reduces the timeliness of trust and the influence of switch attack. Before the recommendation trust calculation, the Fuzzy C-Means algorithm is used to filter out the malicious recommendation value, and then the similarity and difference degree are used to calculate the reliability of the recommendation trust value. Then, according to the actual dynamic environment of the Internet of Vehicles, the adaptive weight is used to conduct the comprehensive evaluation of the nodes to improve the adaptability of the model. The simulation findings demonstrate that this model exhibits quicker convergence and reduced recommendation errors compared to alternative models, thereby enhancing the precision of trust evaluation.