RPPM: A Reputation-Based and Privacy-Preserving Platoon Management Scheme in Vehicular Networks

Platoon refers to a group of vehicles traveling in a train-like strategy with a lean inter-vehicle gap, which can increase road capacity and reduce energy consumption. A platoon is composed of several member vehicles and one leader vehicle which determines the driving pattern of the platoon. Therefore, it is crucial to select a vehicle with the highest reputation value as the leader vehicle in a platoon. Reputation value is a private parameter of each vehicle, and how to preserve its privacy is also an issue worth paying attention to. Therefore, in this paper, a reputation-based and privacy-preserving platoon management (RPPM) scheme in vehicular networks is proposed. Specifically, we design a secure comparison protocol (SCP) to select a leader vehicle for each platoon. The SCP protocol not only reduces the involvement of trust authority but also preserves the privacy of vehicles’ reputation values. Furthermore, the cloud server aggregates reputation ciphertexts and feedback scores of the member vehicles based on the homomorphism characteristic of Paillier ciphertexts, and the reputation value privacy of member vehicles is preserved without affecting the aggregation results. The theoretical analysis indicates that the RPPM scheme is privacy-preserving and secure enough to resist several common attacks in vehicular networks. Simulations are conducted to demonstrate the performance of the RPPM scheme, and the results show that the RPPM scheme significantly outperforms the existing schemes in computation and communication overheads.