Existence of Trust-field in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks: Empirical Evidence

The paper formalizes the per-vehicle logit-based trust score θ ∈ (0,1) and defines a bin-averaged spatiotemporal “trust field,” but offers only empirical evidence and no formal propositions about how single-vehicle changes must affect bin means. The candidate solution’s (a) is a direct consequence of the logistic map and the paper’s bin-mean construction; the paper explicitly states the conditional expectation ranges from 0 to 1 and then averages it over bins, aligning with the model’s reasoning . For (b), the model correctly shows the advertised implication fails in general (a single vehicle’s change can be masked by offsetting changes), and the paper does not assert that implication—only that the trust field evolves spatiotemporally in aggregate . For (c), under the attacker model (90% drops, 100–500 ms delays) the model gives a uniform upper bound τ<1 for bins containing only malicious traces; this is logically sound under the stated monotonicity and bounded-feature assumptions, though the sign of the PFD coefficient and per-window packet bounds are not specified in the paper and should be stated as assumptions . Overall, the paper is empirically consistent but theoretically incomplete relative to the question; the model’s analysis is correct given its explicit (and reasonable) additional assumptions.