A trust management framework using forest fire model to propagate emergency messages in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV)

Abstract

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) finds a prime application in road safety via emergency message transmission which helps drivers take an intelligent decision on the road. However, as malicious nodes can pose serious challenges, particularly on highway traffic, trust management is essential for excluding malicious nodes from the network. In order to transfer emergency messages efficiently, we consider different communities among the nodes in the network based on their social activities and interests. In this paper, we propose a novel nature-inspired forest fire model for the selection of minimum number of broadcaster nodes in the network for the dissemination of emergency messages. The proposed model maps the spread of emergency messages in the network to the spread of wildfire in a forest, and the key factors for message transmission are established by analyzing the forest fire model. Finally, the proposed model decides whether or not to relay the message based on the nodes' trust value, which is calculated using behavioral parameters. Thus, all the nodes with less trust value can be considered as malicious nodes and effectively excluded from the network using the trust values. Experiments were carried out, and the findings revealed that the proposed system was very resilient to a variety of network conditions, and that the selected minimal number of special nodes was better capable of propagating the emergency message throughout the network.