MESMERIC: Machine Learning-Based Trust Management Mechanism for the Internet of Vehicles

The emerging yet promising paradigm of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has recently gained considerable attention from researchers from academia and industry. As an indispensable constituent of the futuristic smart cities, the underlying essence of the IoV is to facilitate vehicles to exchange safety-critical information with the other vehicles in their neighborhood, vulnerable pedestrians, supporting infrastructure, and the backbone network via vehicle-to-everything communication in a bid to enhance the road safety by mitigating the unwarranted road accidents via ensuring safer navigation together with guaranteeing the intelligent traffic flows. This requires that the safety-critical messages exchanged within an IoV network and the vehicles that disseminate the same are highly reliable (i.e., trustworthy); otherwise, the entire IoV network could be jeopardized. A state-of-the-art trust-based mechanism is, therefore, highly imperative for identifying and removing malicious vehicles from an IoV network. Accordingly, in this paper, a machine learning-based trust management mechanism, MESMERIC, has been proposed that takes into account the notions of direct trust (encompassing the trust attributes of interaction success rate, similarity, familiarity, and reward and punishment), indirect trust (involving confidence of a particular trustor on the neighboring nodes of a trustee, and the direct trust between the said neighboring nodes and the trustee), and context (comprising vehicle types and operating scenarios) in order to not only ascertain the trust of vehicles in an IoV network but to segregate the trustworthy vehicles from the untrustworthy ones by means of an optimal decision boundary. A comprehensive evaluation of the envisaged trust management mechanism has been carried out which demonstrates that it outperforms other state-of-the-art trust management mechanisms.