Towards Smart Trust Management of VANETs

In vehicular applications, the cost of additional infrastructure deployments such as roadside units (RSUs), cellular networks, and mobile cloud computing is an obstacle towards the enhancement of the quality of the traffic provided services. The idea of partial reliance on fog computing to support the existing infrastructure is proposed in few research papers. In this paper, we conceive the idea of involving fog nodes in the trust evaluation process. By integrating fog nodes as coordinator resources in Vehicle Ad hoc Networks (VANETs), the quality of services and applications can be significantly enhanced. Possible services fog nodes can perform to reduce the burden on agents include event detection, cluster head selection, and misbehaviour detection. Also, we propose a novel task-based trust experience that evaluates the trustworthiness of a vehicle according to the type of task demanded by examining its historical records. The proposed framework reduces communication demand between the agents by leveraging a vehicle's historical records. Also, the proposed model enables the cluster head to employ not only the most trusted vehicle but also the most competent vehicle for a specific task.