Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. DOI 10.1007/s12083-012-0136-8 A social network approach to trust management

Abstract In the past few years, vehicular ad hoc networks(VANETs) was studied extensively by re-searchers. VANETs is a type of P2P network, though it has some distinct characters (fast moving, short lived connection etc.). In this paper, we present sev-eral limitations of current trust management schemes in VANETs and propose ways to counter them. We first review several trust management techniques in VANETs and argue that the ephemeral nature of VANETs render them useless in practical situations. We identify that the problem of information cascad-ing and oversampling, which commonly arise in so-cial networks, also adversely affects trust management schemes in VANETs. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to introduce information cascading and oversampling to VANETs. We show that simple voting for decision making leads to oversampling and gives incorrect results in VANETs. To overcome this prob-lem, we propose a novel voting scheme. In our scheme, each vehicle has different voting weight according t