A Reputation System for Traffic Safety Event on Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Traffic safety applications on vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have drawn a lot of attention in recent years with their promising functions on car accident reduction, real-time traffic information support, and enhancement of comfortable driving experience on roadways. However, an inaccurate traffic warning message will impact drivers’ decisions, waste drivers’ time and fuel in their vehicles, and even invoke serious car accidents. To enable eco-friendly driving VANET environments, that is, to save fuel and time in this context, we proposed an event-based reputation system to prevent the spread of false traffic warning messages. In this system, a dynamic reputation evaluation mechanism is introduced to determine whether an incoming traffic message is significant and trustworthy to the driver. The proposed system is characterized and evaluated through experimental simulations. The simulation results show that, with a proper reputation adaptation mechanism and appropriate threshold settings, our proposed system can effectively prevent false messages spread on various VANET environments.