Reinforcement Learning Based Misbehavior Detection in Vehicular Networks

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication is contributing towards the realization of futuristic vehicular networks such as Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV). The IoV is expected to usher in a new direction of intelligence and networking to achieve the goal of intelligent transport systems, which rely on the secure exchange of messages between vehicles and infrastructure. However, the transmission of false/incorrect data by malicious vehicles may cause serious damages on road safety. Therefore, it is crucial to detect safety-threatening incorrect information and mitigate potentially detrimental effects on road users. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based misbehavior detection approach for V2X scenarios. In our method, the RL-based detection model processes V2X data broadcast by vehicles as time-series at the roadside units, and classifies incoming data as misbehaving or genuine. We evaluate the proposed RL-based approach for detection of various attack types using an open-source dataset, and compare its performance against recent work in misbehavior detection. Our scheme is able to detect all types of misbehavior with a superior recall of 0.9970 and an F1 score of 0.9845, yielding a significant improvement over the benchmarks. Our research outcomes further reveal that misbehaving vehicles can be detected with a great accuracy of 0.9882 by exploiting real-time V2X information.