Abstract
In vehicular ad hoc networks, peers make decisions on the basis of the information provided by the other peers. If the received information is fake, then the result could be catastrophic, such as road accidents. Therefore, many researchers use the concept of trust to evaluate the trustworthiness of the received data. However, existing trust management schemes (proposed so far for the vehicular networks) are suffered from various limitations. For example, some schemes measure trust on the basis of the history of interactions, which is infeasible for vehicular networks due to its ephemeral nature. Also, none of the existing schemes operate in an identity anonymous environment. In order to overcome these limitations, we propose a novel trust management scheme for identity anonymous vehicular ad hoc networks. The proposed method is simple and completely decentralized that makes it easy to implement in the vehicular networks. Also, we prove that the proposed method is not only robust, but it also detects false location and time information. Furthermore, it introduces linear time complexity, which makes it suitable to use in real time. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.