LPPTE: A lightweight privacy-preserving trust evaluation scheme for facilitating distributed data fusion in cooperative vehicular safety applications

Vehicular networks have tremendous potential to improve road safety, traffic efficiency, and driving comfort, where cooperative vehicular safety applications are a significant branch. In cooperative vehicular safety applications, through the distributed data fusion for large amounts of data from multiple nearby vehicles, each vehicle can intelligently perceive the surrounding conditions beyond the capability of its own onboard sensors. Trust evaluation and privacy preservation are two primary concerns for facilitating the distributed data fusion in cooperative vehicular safety applications. They have conflicting requirements and a good balance between them is urgently needed. Meanwhile, the computation, communication, and storage overheads will all influence the applicability of a candidate scheme. In this paper, we propose a Lightweight Privacy-Preserving Trust Evaluation (LPPTE) scheme which can primely balance the trust evaluation and privacy preservation with low overheads for facilitating the distributed data fusion in cooperative vehicular safety applications. Furthermore, we provide exhaustive theoretical analysis and simulation evaluation for the LPPTE scheme, and the results demonstrate that the LPPTE scheme can obviously improve the accuracy of fusion results and is significantly superior to the state-of-the-art schemes in multiple aspects.