Emergency warning messages dissemination in vehicular social networks: A trust based scheme

To ensure users' safety on the road, a plethora of dissemination schemes for Emergency Warning Messages (EWMs) have been proposed in vehicular networks. However, the issue of false alarms triggered by malicious users still poses serious challenges, such as disruption of vehicular traffic especially on highways leading to precarious effects. This paper proposes a novel Trust based Dissemination Scheme (TDS) for EWMs in Vehicular Social Networks (VSNs) to solve the aforementioned issue. To ensure the authenticity of EWMs, we exploit the user-post credibility network for identifying true and false alarms. Moreover, we develop a reputation mechanism by calculating a trust-score for each node based on its social-utility, behavior, and contribution in the network. We utilize the hybrid architecture of VSNs by employing social-groups based dissemination in Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) mode, whereas nodes' friendship-network in Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) mode. We analyze the proposed scheme for accuracy by extensive simulations under varying malicious nodes ratio in the network. Furthermore, we compare the efficiency of TDS with state-of-the-art dissemination schemes in VSNs for delivery ratio, transmission delay, number of transmissions, and hop-count. The experimental results validate the significant efficacy of TDS in accuracy and aforementioned network parameters.