VeMisNet: Enhanced Feature Engineering for Deep Learning-Based Misbehavior Detection in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Ensuring secure and reliable communication in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) is critical for safe transportation systems. This paper presents Vehicular Misbehavior Network (VeMisNet), a deep learning framework for detecting misbehaving vehicles, with primary contributions in systematic feature engineering and scalability analysis. VeMisNet introduces domain-informed spatiotemporal features—including DSRC neighborhood density, inter-message timing patterns, and communication frequency analysis—derived from the publicly available VeReMi Extension Dataset. The framework evaluates Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and Bidirectional LSTM architectures across dataset scales from 100 K to 2 M samples, encompassing all 20 attack categories. To address severe class imbalance (59.6% legitimate vehicles), VeMisNet applies SMOTE post train–test split, preventing data leakage while enabling balanced evaluation. Bidirectional LSTM with engineered features achieves 99.81% accuracy and F1-score on 500 K samples, with remarkable scalability maintaining >99.5% accuracy at 2 M samples. Critical metrics include 0.19% missed attack rates, under 0.05% false alarms, and 41.76 ms inference latency. The study acknowledges important limitations, including reliance on simulated data, single-split evaluation, and potential adversarial vulnerability. Domain-informed feature engineering provides 27.5% relative improvement over dimensionality reduction and 22-fold better scalability than basic features. These results establish new VANET misbehavior detection benchmarks while providing honest assessment of deployment readiness and research constraints.