Existence of Trust-field in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks: Empirical Evidence

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) play a crucial role in enhancing road safety and traffic efficiency by enabling communication between vehicles (V2V) and between vehicles and infrastructure (V2I). Robust trust management is necessary to ensure the reliability of information in decentralized systems. This paper presents the notion of a ``Trust Field" in VANETs, conceptualized as the behavior of the nodes that represents trust levels evolving in both spatial and temporal dimensions. Using the LogitTrust model, we provide empirical evidence of how trust fields in vehicular networks change over time in different scenarios, including when malicious nodes are present. The results of our study demonstrate that the trust domain can adjust to fluctuations in network conditions, thereby offering a comprehensive metric for assessing the reliability of nodes. This innovative method improves the dependability of VANET applications by efficiently detecting and mitigating malicious actions.