Stimulating truth-telling and cooperation among nodes in VANETs through payment and punishment scheme

This paper proposes a Payment Punishment Scheme (PPS) working along with various established models to encourage truth telling during election process of the nodes in a cluster, motivate individual nodes in a cluster to cooperate and stimulate the nodes to monitor and acknowledge the successful information interchanges between nodes and/or clusters. To prompt the creation of a robust cluster in a Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET), vehicles with greater resources (weights) are elected as Cluster Heads after scrutinizing their advertised weights (using the VCG model). The vehicles are discouraged to provide willful wrong information by awarding them incentives called reputation, which upon accumulation secure a higher priority of information interchange for the vehicle. Each vehicle can increase their reputation by participating in election process, forwarding the data packets and monitoring and reporting the performance of other nodes by acting as watchdogs. A modified Extended Dempster-Shafer model is used to discourage one or more selfish and/or malicious nodes to effectively implement the PPS by using watchdogs, gateway nodes, etc. The proposed scheme has been analyzed with extensive experiments. The effectiveness of this method is compared with state-of-the-art QoS-OLSR protocol. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.