Heartbeat Message Based Misbehavior Detection Scheme for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks

Safety applications in VANET mostly rely upon the correctness of position and other vehicle kinematics information contained in heartbeat messages. A false information or incorrect notification can create traffic inconvenience on the road and may results into the loss of property and human lives. An authenticated node, which disseminates false information intentionally/ unintentionally is termed as misbehaving node. Prior knowledge about this kind of misbehaving node might not be possible in ephemeral network like VANET. It is required to have some verification mechanism in place, which can ensure the reliability of the information content of heartbeat messages, at least in terms of reported position and other vehicle kinematics. A good amount of research has been reported for the authentication of the node in VANET, but misbehavior detection research in VANET is still in nascent stage. The paper proposes a heartbeat message based short-term misbehavior detection scheme, which is capable of identifying the source of false information with very high probability. The proposed scheme has been implemented and analysed in simulation environment with the help of ns-2 and VanetMobiSim. The results are found to be encouraging and pave the way for further research in this direction.