Secured and Cooperative Publish/Subscribe Scheme in Autonomous Vehicular Networks

In order to save computing power yet enhance safety, there is a strong intention for autonomous vehicles (AVs) in future to drive collaboratively by sharing sensory data and computing results among neighbors. However, the intense collaborative computing and data transmissions among unknown others will inevitably introduce severe security concerns. Aiming at addressing security concerns in future AVs, in this paper, we develop SPAD, a secured framework to forbid free-riders and promote trustworthy data dissemination in collaborative autonomous driving. Specifically, we first introduce a publish/subscribe framework for inter-vehicle data transmissions. To defend against free-riding attacks, we formulate the interactions between publisher AVs and subscriber AVs as a vehicular publish/subscribe game, and incentivize AVs to deliver high-quality data by analyzing the Stackelberg equilibrium of the game. We also design a reputation evaluation mechanism in the game to identify malicious AVs in disseminating fake information. Furthermore, for lack of sufficient knowledge on parameters of the network model and the user cost model in dynamic game scenarios, a reinforcement learning based algorithm with hotbooting is developed to obtain the optimal strategies of subscriber AVs and publisher AVs with free-rider prevention. Extensive simulations are conducted, and the results validate that our SPAD can effectively prevent free-riders and enhance the dependability of disseminated contents, compared with conventional schemes.