Edinburgh Napier University

  Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have been instrumental in intelligent transportation systems that enhances road safety and road management significantly. This technology enables communication among vehicles where drivers can share road information conditions. However, users can threaten spectrum access caused by launching passive and active attacks that prevent nodes to access spectrum efficiently. Securing spectrum access has become critical issue in VANET to ensure reliability and trustworthiness. In this paper, a novel collaborative approach during the spectrum access process is proposed. In our approach, vehicles are divided into clusters and Road Side Unit (RSU) is used to manage spectrum access for each cluster. RSU monitors the traffic for each node and identifies the malicious and misbehaving nodes. The proposed approach measures the node’s data reliability using a decision function. The scheme is applicable to a wide range of VANET applications, such as traffic safety, commercial applications, and Internet access.