Anomaly Detection Based on Spatio-Temporal and Sparse Features of Network Traffic in VANETs

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) have received a great attention recently due to their potential and various applications. However, the initial phase of the VANET has many research challenges that need to be addressed, such as the issues of security and privacy protection caused by the openness of wireless communication networks among the city-wide applied regions. Specially, anomaly detection for a VANET has become a challenging problem, due to the changes in the scenario of VANETs comparing with traditional wireless networks. Motivated by this issue, we focus on the problem of anomaly detection in VANETs, and propose an effective anomaly detection approach based on the convolutional neural network in this paper. The proposed approach takes into account the spatio-temporal and sparse features of VANET traffic, and it uses a convolutional neural network architecture and a loss function based on Mahalanobis distance to extract and estimate the traffic matrix. Then, reinforcement learning is used to implement anomaly detection. Furthermore, a comprehensive assessment is provided to validate the proposed approach, which illustrates the effectiveness of this approach.