Cheater detection in vehicular networks

In this paper, we focus on congestion cheaters in vehicular networks who report non-existing high-way congestion information. In this solution, we require each vehicle to only detect its local highway traffic pattern to detect congestion and then identify cheaters. Vehicles can broadcast a congestion event to other vehicles. However, a rogue vehicle can also broadcast a bogus congestion message in order to get advantage over other vehicles for malicious purposes. To address this cheating problem, we develop a cheater detection protocol, in which each vehicle only depends on local velocity and distance measurements to validate the congestion event sent by a vehicle. Our presented protocol is based on the traffic flow theory to detect the Kinematic wave caused by congestion. The presented cheater detection solution is effective in that it only requires vehicles to communicate with its neighboring vehicles without relying on a centralized controlled congestion detection and prediction system.