Signaling Game-based Misbehavior Inspection in V2I-enabled Highway Operations

Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications are increasingly supporting highway operations such as electronic toll collection, carpooling, and vehicle platooning. In this paper we study the incentives of strategic misbehavior by individual vehicles who can exploit the security vulnerabilities in V2I communications and impact the highway operations. We consider a V2I-enabled highway segment facing two classes of vehicles (agent populations), each with an authorized access to one server (subset of lanes). Vehicles are strategic in that they can misreport their class (type) to the system operator and get unauthorized access to the server dedicated to the other class. This misbehavior causes a congestion externality on the compliant vehicles, and thus, needs to be deterred. We focus on an environment where the operator is able to inspect the vehicles for misbehavior based on their reported types. The inspection is costly and successful detection incurs a fine on the misbehaving vehicle. We formulate a signaling game to study the strategic interaction between the vehicle classes and the operator. Our equilibrium analysis provides conditions on the cost parameters that govern the vehicles’ incentive to misbehave, and determine the operator’s optimal inspection strategy.