Trust-based security adaptation mechanism for Vehicular Sensor Networks

Vehicular Sensor Networks (VSNs) are foreseen as a promising technology that can provide safe and reliable road travel in smart cities. By establishing pervasive connectivity among vehicles and infrastructure units on the road, various intelligent transport applications could be realized. Efficient network security for VSNs thus becomes a key challenge to reliably implement these applications. However, robust security techniques incur high security overhead and processing delays which significantly impact Quality of Service (QoS) particularly in a dense traffic scenario. In this paper, we propose a trust-based security adaptation mechanism to improve the QoS of safety applications in VSNs. The trust level is calculated using connectivity duration, security level and centrality metrics of nearby vehicles. The simulation results we have obtained with our proposed research shows an improvement of 25–65% in terms of safety awareness and 33–53% improvement in terms of packet inter-arrival time of safety applications in VSNs.