Abstract
This article discusses an effective revocation scheme for disconnected Delay Tolerant Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs). Malicious vehicles can exhibit various misbehaviour such as dropping packets due to selfish reasons. Selfishness can be due to the need to conserve limited resources such as energy and bandwidth. This forces vehicles to either drop all or some of the packets they receive. This is particularly obtainable in multi-hop forwarding networks where packets are routed from one vehicle to another towards their destination. When some packets are dropped, the usefulness of the system is not fully realised since it affects the quality of information available to vehicles for making driving decisions such as road manoeuvres. Additionally, packet dropping can degrade the routing efficiency of the system. In extreme cases of misbehaviour, it is important to stop such vehicles from further participation in network communication. One way of achieving this is through revocation. However, it is important to establish mechanisms for identifying such vehicles before blacklisting them for revocation. Our objective here is to address the question of how much we can use a trust-based scheme where vehicles cannot always be expected to follow normal protocols for revocation. Revocation or suspension of misbehaving vehicles is essential to avoid havoc and possible economic damage.