Evidence Theory-Based Trust Management for the Social Internet of Vehicles

The Social Internet of Vehicles (SIoV) is a concept combining the principles of vehicular and social networks, where entities, such as vehicles, drivers, passengers and infrastructure, share information not only for intelligent transportation or cooperative mobility needs, but also using social network principles. Trust in the information exchanged between vehicles in a vehicular network is paramount to achieving safety and reliability of transportation. We propose a trust management model for SIoV that integrates entity trust from direct interactions between vehicles, indirect trust from recommendations, and social trust reflecting the drivers’ social attributes. We utilize Dempster–Shafer Theory to effectively manage inherent uncertainties within this network, enabling robust aggregation of various trust evidences. Our simulation results show the effectiveness of our model in accurately identifying and mitigating malicious entities within the network performing trust-related attacks.