KITE: an efficient scheme for trust estimation and detection of errant nodes in vehicular cyber-physical systems

Advancement in sensing and networking technology enhances the capability of mechatronic systems by many folds and improves the way it interacts with its physical environment. However, the dependency on network technology introduces a new set of challenges. Vehicular cyber-physical system (VCPS) is one such example that came into existence with the objective of enhancing road safety and convenience. In VCPS, the safety applications rely on the correctness of the kinematics information received from other vehicles in the vicinity. Incorrect kinematics information may result in increase in road hazards and creates more confusion than convenience. Irrespective of the reasons, detection of such errant nodes in VCPS is imperative. Moreover, the trust estimation of the nodes can play an important role to classify them as genuine and errant. In this work, an efficient scheme is proposed for trust estimation and detection of those errant nodes that disseminate incorrect kinematics information in VCPS. Simulations using ns-2 and VanetMobiSim under realistic vehicular network environment are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. The results are encouraging and reveal that the proposed scheme is suitable for implementation in real vehicular environment for detection of such errant nodes with high accuracy. Copyright (C) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.