TROUVE: A trusted routing protocol for urban vehicular environments

Delivering data through the most reliable and trusted path is essential for any kind of network. Moreover, in highly mobile and dynamic networks such as VANETs, the problem is more complex since every node requires, at least, a previous knowledge about its own neighborhood to select the most adequate path. In addition, the open communication medium causes other problems that any routing protocol must manage, without forgetting the VANETs´ sensitivity to delay. In this paper we propose a trust-based routing protocol for vehicular urban environments called TROUVE. The proposed protocol aims at finding the shortest and most trusted path to destination taking into account the real traffic information and the distribution of dishonest nodes in the network. In this study, simulation results show the effectiveness of our protocol in terms of data delivery and end-to-end delay. We also show that, even in the presence of a high number of misbehaving nodes, our protocol offers equally good results.