SOCIAL INTERNET OF VEHICLES

FOR SMART CITIES

Syed Haider Ali
B-20174
Distributed systems Section (C)
TUESDAY & THURSDAY 9:30 AM – 10:50 AM

University of South Asia

Introduction
An important factor of smart city is next generation vehicles that offer wider IoT concepts such as data
sensing, communication and social capabilities.

Wireless networks can be classified into infrastructure wireless networks, non-structured networks and
hybrid networks. An example of hybrid networks is hybrid-VANET. Smart vehicles combine important
component of IoT and smart cities to create communication between vehicles and the Internet. VANETS
depend on roadside and on-board units to make connectivity possible. RSU connects vehicles to a larger
infrastructure or core network. OBU is a network device attached in vehicles that supports different
wireless networks. CarPlay, Android Auto and Windows Mobile are in-car infotainment systems
announced by Google, Apple and Microsoft.

Social Internet of Vehicles (SIoV) contains social interactions between vehicles and drivers. Vehicles are
becoming autonomous and interactions between drivers and passengers are built by apps supporting
social interactions.

New applications are developed that can materialize idea of SIoV like RoadSpeak, NaviTweet, Caravan
Track etc.

SIoV Technologies and Components: Next Generation of Vehicles

Vehicular networks is augmented by wireless vehicular communication techniques like DSRC, LTE, IEEE
802.11p and WiMax.

Vehicular ad hoc networks or VANETs are responsible for improving traffic safety and providing easy
applications to drivers. There are several forms of communications like vehicle-to-vehicle V2V, vehicle-
to-infrastructure V2I, vehicle-to-broadband cloud V2B, vehicle-to-human V2H and vehicle-to-sensor V2S.

According to Vegni et al, next generation vehicles are smart vehicles because they are collection of five
features such as self-driving, safety driving, social driving, electric vehicles and mobile applications.

Self-driving
The purpose of autonomous cars is to drive on its own without human interference and to steer on
roads safely to diminish traffic accidents. The industry described six levels of autonomous driving. At
level 0, there is no automation. At level 1, vehicle is fully controlled by driver. At level 2, there exists
partial automation.

Current market technology has features on accreditation Level 2 in cars such as 2014 Mercedes S-Class,
2014 BMW i3 and 2015 Audi A7. At level 3, there is conditional automation. At level 4, there is high
automation. At level 5, there is full automation.

In future, most automobile companies predict to present features on higher accreditation level. For
example, Tesla and Google expect to build a fully-autonomous vehicles. Also Mercedes-Benz, GM,
Nissan, Volvo, BMW and Audi claim to build fully-autonomous cars.
Safety driving
To achieve the goal of diminished casualties, injuries and zero traffic accidents, vehicular networks
create applications to present wide range of information to drivers. For example, use of V21
communication.

Social driving
Vehicles collect real-time traffic information by sensing from a social network that consists of
neighboring vehicles, and assist drivers to choose the best route. For example, Waze, Google Live Traffic
to Google Maps, Uber, Lyft, etc.

Electric Vehicles
Customers are much interested in fully-electric, hybrid and zero-emission vehicles. They prove to be safe
for environment in highly populated areas. Modern ways of charging electric vehicles can be static or
dynamic. For example, stationary stations, dynamic wireless charging methods, eco-routing, etc.

Mobile Applications
On the basis of the collection of networks adapters, on-board units, multiple sensors and GPS receivers,
vehicles gather information about themselves and the environment and release information to
neighbouring vehicles.

VANET applications are classified into comfort and safety applications. Comfort applications facilitate
drivers and passengers with comfort and ease. Safety applications help to prevent road accidents and
augment road safety.

Vehicle Context-Awareness
Context-aware systems are the ones that have the ability to modify their behavior to their existing
contextual environment. Vehicle context-awareness can be provided by 3 subsystems: sensing,
reasoning and acting.

In sensing subsystem, vehicle collects context data from different sensors attached with the vehicle’s
OBU.

In reasoning subsystem, vehicle gathers high-level contextual information. For example, detecting
driver’s fatigue levels.

Warning messages, in-vehicle alerts and smart assisted parking are examples of high-level applications
deployed to diminish road accidents and road congestion.

Several context-aware systems and frameworks for SIoV have been proposed such as s-frame, a
framework for social vehicular networks created by in-vehicle or mobiles used by passengers.

VANET on-street context-aware smart parking assisting system helps to locate and reserve a parking
slot.

Cloud-based context-aware dynamic parking service considers rush hours and road conditions and lets
the driver park their vehicle alongside the road for short intervals.
SocialDrive presents data to drivers that show their driving style. By this drivers can reduce fuel
consumption by reducing unwanted habits.

Social Network Analysis in SIoVs

Social network analysis (SNA) can be used to analyze social networks. Vehicles, drivers and passengers
are represented by nodes and interactions between them are shown by edges. Applying SNA on
vehicular networks can augment the performance of communication protocols and services.

Centrality of Nodes in an SIoV

Centrality metrics are used to determine nodes that are more central in a graph and prove to be as relay
nodes in terms of fast information release. For example, in figure 1, nodes A and B contribute in many
shortest paths in rest of the nodes hence they are the most central nodes. This is called betweenness
centrality.

Figure 1. Betweenness centrality

In mobile networking, when the destination node location is unknown, message is passed to nearest
central node, thus increasing the chances of choosing a suitable carrier of the information towards the
destination.

In degree centrality, central actors have most ties in the network graph. Closeness centrality figures out
how close one actor is to the other.

Road segments are ranked based on how many vehicles are going to traverse it. Each vehicle is assigned
a unique ranking based on road segments traversal. It ranks the significance of nodes based on traffic of
road segments and route of the vehicle. Bradai and Ahmed rank vehicles upon the relative location to
their neighbours and their capability to reach other vehicles.

Roadside units (RSU) are devices located on roadside that present connectivity to vehicles. In Social-
based privacy-preserving packet forwarding (SPRING), RSU must be released where many social
interactions occur. In urban scenarios, density-based approach in which RSU are deployed according to
the inverse proportion of vehicle densities.

Social Clustering of Vehicles

Clustering method is vastly used in all sorts of networks. Clustering brings following benefits to a
network.

1. Clustering can solve the problem of broadcast storm.

2. Clustering reduces packet delays and provide better spectrum utilization in time and space.

3. The network appears to be smaller and more stable by forming small groups of nodes that have
similar characteristics.

VANET is a very dynamic network because its vehicles has huge variations. When the receiver and
source are moving in opposite directions, a communication problem arises called Doppler shift. Radio
propagation model, density of vehicles and roadmap are key factors that obstruct delivery of warning
messages between vehicles.

APROVE, a protocol presented by Hassanabadi et al. for distributed election of cluster heads. Maglaras
et al presented a distributed clustering algorithm, in which virtual forces among nodes are applied to
build stable clusters. Vegni et al proposed a cluster-based routing protocol that allows vehicles to
selectively send messages and diminish network overload, message duplication and packet collisions.

Distinct social profiles of the drivers can become basic trait to build social groups of vehicles and drivers.
The social behavior of the drivers are obtained from roadside units. The regularity of contact between
vehicles with fixed routes and the routes that the vehicles follow or tend to follow both parameters
assist in forming stable clusters.

Platooning, a special category of clusters, in which the lead vehicle takes control while the remaining
vehicles manage their speed to follow the lead vehicle. As the vehicles become members of platoon,
they build a social network while they move. The lead vehicle becomes cluster head and take over
communications between platoon and outer network.

Figure 2. A platoon of vehicles

SIoV Security Issues

The security of VANET is an essential part of SIoV. The heterogeneous environment of the vehicular
network makes the security a more complicated problem to solve.
SIoV Threats
Raya has classified the threats into insider/outsider, malicious/rationale and active/passive. Zeadally
classified the threats into threats to availability, threats to authenticity and threats to confidentiality.
Denial of Service Attack
This attack jams the traffic with great number of irrelevant messages that consequently negatively
affects the communication between network’s nodes, on-board units and roadside units. Voting scheme
can address the problem of DoS attacks. However, it is not effective in all cases because the attacker can
disguise himself and generate false identities.
False Message Injection
The insider attacker can release a false message and broadcast it to the network consequently
disturbing traffic flow and affecting the decisions of other drivers. Proof-of-relevance (PoR) can address
the false message injection problem. It watches vehicles provide valid endorsements to information
about an event. Thus, the event reporter can prove he/she is valid to the event.
Malware
Malware combined with the advanced communication facilities VANETs bring to SIoV, affect the internal
CAN bus and damage important services. According to dummy tests, remote attacks like these can risk
the safety of drivers and passengers.
A primary challenge is the maintenance of updated patches ad signature files. So cloud-assisted vehicle
malware defence framework proposed by Zhang makes the problem more manageable. Manufacturers
and infrastructure providers are not prepared to or afford to defend against the delicate nature of
advanced persistent threats (APT).
Masquerading and Sybil
Vehicle fakes its identity and shows to be valid in the vehicle network ad conduct attacks and inject false
messages. This is called masquerading attack. The attacker creates multiple identities and shows to be
multiple valid vehicles at the same time. By that they can create a traffic chaos. This is called Sybil
attack. It can be detected using resource testing and public key cryptography.
Impersonation attack
In this attack, the attacker steals the identity of a valid vehicle and generate messages on vehicle’s
behalf. This can affect other driver’s decision making and create traffic chaos.
Solutions and future directions
Great amount of research has been made to protect vehicular networks from being attacked like public
key infrastructure, trusted architectures, key management and authentication schemes. However lesser
research has been made in the domain of social vehicular network security. This calls for new research in
two domains. Firstly on security issues from a social perspective and secondly on interaction between
human agents and technical security solutions.
SIoV Trust Issues
Trust in a social network comprising of vehicles and drivers has not been well studied.
Trust Characteristics of SIoV
Uncertainty
As SIoV’s nature is dynamic, uncertainty of an entity’s identity, the uncertainty of an interaction entity’s
behavior and the uncertainty in observations can exist. Expressing trust in a discrete-valued variable can
better capture the dynamic feature.

Subjectivity
When trust decisions are made within the SIoV, there arises a risk in vehicular networks. To address this
issue, recommendation systems are proposed. For example, a recommendation system for online social
networks based on Bayesian inference proposed by Yang.
Intransitivity
Trust transitivity is based on the extent to which you trust the trustee and its recommendations.
Recommendation systems are developed to make trust-based recommendations by allowing trust
ratings with peers.

Context Dependence
Trust established in SIoV is context-dependent. Josang’s subjective logic has been greatly used to model
trust networks. Cerutti utilizes subjective logic in a decision-making approach considering the notion of
confidence.

Non-cooperativeness
Trust in SIoV is not often cooperative because of entities declining to cooperate due selfishness and
maliciousness. There are existing work going on over separating selfish and compassionate entities.

Trust and Reputation

Trust and reputation are used but they are different in their meanings. Trust denotes either an entity
believes in the trust quality of the peer or not. Reputation is opinion about any entity. It can be positive
or negative. Reputation system’s goal is to build trust for entities and provide information to other
entities to make trust-based decisions.

The assumptions that peers build trust through interactions and further interactions are influenced by
that trust are more difficult in the dynamic environment of SIoV. For example, targeted cyber-attack
scenario, specifically when malware is affecting the vehicles the whole platoon.

SIoV Privacy Issues

Privacy in vehicular networks
Vehicles broadcast unencrypted messages that contain vehicle’s identifier, its location, speed and
heading. This data is used to provide comfort and safety applications to drivers but it’s abused by
different third parties like employers, insurance companies or criminal organizations. They can track
individuals and their detailed behavioural profiles.

If the messages being sent are authenticated, privacy requirements conflict with it.

Pseudonyms are used for preserving privacy. To prevent tracking of attacks and pseudonyms are
exchanged continuously for which methods like mix zones and silent periods are used.

Privacy in social networks

Social networks have complex privacy policies and don’t provide privacy controls to users. Users’ private
information is also revealed by attacks. Sometimes, the user’s privacy is revealed by its friends and
family.

Towards the provider of social network, privacy can be achieved by encrypting all information that the
user posts. Anonymous users can be identified through social network graph. This can be avoided
through link privacy.
Privacy enhancing technologies for the SIoV
Combining the privacy issues from social and vehicular networks, three risks are sought out. Firstly,
almost all the attackers can access the social and vehicular networks. Secondly, vehicular network
messages combined with driver’s preferences and behavior can be abused for marketing or surveillance.
Thirdly, it is vague that how privacy policies are delivered to users. An SIoV architecture is presented
that addresses privacy issues. But it has three weaknesses. Firstly, it relies on cloud computing so issues
regarding cloud computing fall in. Secondly, the architecture tags all messages with privacy value.
Thirdly, technical privacy protections like cryptographic methods are absent in that architecture.

Existing technologies need to be examined completely to provide enough privacy to SIoV.