The basis of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is the exchange of data between entities, and making a decision on received data/event is usually based on information provided by other entities. Many researchers utilize the concept of trust to assess the trustworthiness of the received data. Nevertheless, the lack of a review to sum up the best available research on specific questions on trust management in vehicular ad hoc networks is sensible. This paper presents a systematic literature review to provide comprehensive and unbiased information about various current trust conceptions, proposals, problems, and solutions in VANETs to increase quality of data in transportation. For the purpose of the writing of this paper, a total of 111 articles related to the trust model in VANETs published between 2005 and 2014 were extracted from the most relevant scientific sources (IEEE Computer Society, ACM Digital Library, Springer Link, Science Direct, and Wiley Online Library). Finally, ten articles were eventually analyzed due to several reasons such as relevancy and comprehensiveness of discussion presented in the articles. Using the systematic method of review, this paper succeeds to reveal the main challenges and requirements for trust in VANETs and future research within this scope.Keywords: Systematic literature review; Trust management; VANET; Trust metric 1 Review
IntroductionVehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are a class of ad hoc networks that consist of vehicles and roadside units (RSUs). VANETs were originally created to enhance safety on the road using cooperative collision warning via vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. In V2V communication, vehicles send and receive messages to and from one another. These messages can alert signals about road congestion, accidents ahead, or information about traffic on a given route. V2I communication takes place between nodes and roadside infrastructure and involves finding the nearest cheapest gas station, internet services, online toll payment, etc.According to [1], the applications in VANETs are categorized into safety and non-safety applications. The basis In order to overcome these threats and increase security, several concepts have been proposed by researchers. Wei and Chen [3] stated that authentication is one method for ensuring the integrity of transmitted messages. In [4], the reputation of a vehicle is introduced to evaluate the reliability of received data. Dotzer et al. also stated that a common method to deal with the safety threats in VANETs is to establish trust relationships and detect selfish and malicious entities [5].Security is one of the main issues in VANETs, and trust is a key element of security [6]. Hence, since VANETs are based upon data exchange among vehicles, trustworthiness of data is of great importance. In addition, data communication between trusted vehicles directly affects