A game theory based trust model for Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs)

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) facilitate road safety, transportation security, reliability and management. This paper presents a game theory based trust model for VANETs. The proposed model is based on an attacker and defender security game to identify and counter the attacker/malicious nodes. The parameters considered for attackers and defender's strategy are majority opinion, betweenness centrality, and node density. The outcome of the specific game is determined by the game matrix which contains the cost (payoff) values for possible action-reaction combination. Nash equilibrium when applied to calculate the best strategy for attacker and defender vehicles. The model is simulated in Network Simulator (ns2), and results show that the proposed model performs better than the schemes with random malicious nodes and existing game theory based approach in terms of throughput, retransmission attempts and data drop rate for different attacker and defender scenarios.