A context-aware trust-based communication framework for VNets

Reliable, secure, private and fast communication in vehicular networks (VNets) is extremely challenging due to the highly mobile nature of these networks. Contact time between vehicles is very limited and topology is constantly changing. Trusted communication in VNets is of crucial importance because without trust, all efforts for minimizing the delay or maximizing the reliability could be voided. In this paper, we propose a trust-based framework for communication in VNets that is capable of accommodating traffic from different applications. Our scheme assigns a trust value to each road segment and one to each neighborhood, instead of each car. Thus it scales up easily and is completely distributed. Experimental results demonstrate that this framework outperforms other well-known routing protocols since it routes the messages via trusted vehicles.