Long-term reputation system for vehicular networking based on vehicle's daily commute routine

A vehicular network must ensure a trust relationship among participating “smart vehicles” (vehicles installed with wireless network devices) and roadside infrastructure in order to maximize the benefit provided by the network. In this paper, we present practical ways to provide reliable reputation scores for vehicles in a vehicular network. Because in most of the time, the majority of people drive their vehicles locally for their daily commute (to work places, schools, daycares, superstores, etc), most vehicles have their predefined constant daily trajectories. Based on this phenomenon, roadside infrastructure could rely on repeated daily observations of the same set of passing-by vehicles to build long-term reputation scores for these local “community” vehicles, in the similar way as the reputation built-up for people in a club or a church community. The proposed scheme does not require sufficient density of smart vehicles and only requires each smart vehicle has one secret and verifiable certificate. These features make it especially suitable for the initial deployment stage of vehicular network when the penetration rate of smart vehicles is very low and vehicle-based public-key infrastructure is not mature.