Privacy, reputation, and incentive provision for vehicular social networks

Nowadays, the increasing use of internet in vehicular environments leads to the Vehicular Social Network (VSN) concept as an instance of Internet of Things applications in transportation industry. Information sharing between users in vehicular networks should be done in a privacy-preserving manner, especially users’ location privacy should be preserved. It is also essential to motivate users to participate in the information-sharing system. Moreover, users should be encouraged to behave honestly in the system. This paper presents an information-sharing scheme in VSN, in which not only preserving the privacy of users is supported, but also provides sufficient incentives for users to participate in the system. In addition, the reputation factor is used to encourage users to behave honestly. In the proposed scheme, the Internet platform (Internet of Vehicles) is used for information sharing instead of using the commonly used short-range communication. Furthermore, a ticketing system is used for motivating users to participate in the system. To evaluate the proposed scheme, the Veins simulation tool is used along with the actual data in the Créteil data set. The results of evaluation and analysis of the proposed method show that the quality of the delivered messages affects the number of rewards received by users and also the system works in a fair manner. On the other hand, the system operation is monitored in the presence of whitewashing and slandering attackers. As the result, the proposed system could be reliable in the presence of certain percentages of attackers, depending on the used operation modes. Finally, to ensure the privacy of users, the appropriate size for the areas of movement of vehicles has been analyzed and discussed.