Distributed Reputation for Accurate Vehicle Misbehavior Reporting (DRAMBR)

Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications technology offers enhanced road safety, traffic efficiency, and connectivity. In V2V, vehicles cooperate by broadcasting safety messages to quickly detect and avoid dangerous situations on time or to avoid and reduce congestion. However, vehicles might misbehave, creating false information and sharing it with neighboring vehicles, such as, for example, failing to report an observed accident or falsely reporting one when none exists. If other vehicles detect such misbehavior, they can report it. However, false accusations also constitute misbehavior. In disconnected areas with limited infrastructure, the potential for misbehavior increases due to the scarcity of Roadside Units (RSUs) necessary for verifying the truthfulness of communications. In such a situation, identifying malicious behavior using a standard misbehaving management system is ineffective in areas with limited connectivity. This paper presents a novel mechanism, Distributed Reputation for Accurate Misbehavior Reporting (DRAMBR), offering a fully integrated reputation solution that utilizes reputation to enhance the accuracy of the reporting system by identifying misbehavior in rural networks. The system operates in two phases: offline, using the Local Misbehavior Detection Mechanism (LMDM), where vehicles detect misbehavior and store reports locally, and online, where these reports are sent to a central reputation server. DRAMBR aggregates the reports and integrates DBSCAN for clustering spatial and temporal misbehavior reports, Isolation Forest for anomaly detection, and Gaussian Mixture Models for probabilistic classification of reports. Additionally, Random Forest and XGBoost models are combined to improve decision accuracy. DRAMBR distinguishes between honest mistakes, intentional deception, and malicious reporting. Using an existing mechanism, the updated reputation is available even in an offline environment. Through simulations, we evaluate our proposed reputation system’s performance, demonstrating its effectiveness in achieving a reporting accuracy of approximately 98%. The findings highlight the potential of reputation-based strategies to minimize misbehavior and improve the reliability and security of V2V communications, particularly in rural areas with limited infrastructure, ultimately contributing to safer and more reliable transportation systems.