A distributed location-based service discovery protocol for vehicular ad-hoc networks

Abstract

The Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) is one of the most important techniques in smart cities. The service discovery protocol is a foundation stone of VANET. All the location-based requests could be replied only if the service provider has been discovered. A novel Distributed Location-based Service Discovery Protocol (DLSDP) is proposed in this paper. In this protocol, all the online vehicles are classified into three categories, the distributed directory service vehicles, the gateway vehicles and the member vehicles. The vehicles in the region of interest are organized as one or multiple spanning trees, of which the roots are chosen to be the leader vehicles that implement the function of service discovery in that interest region. The role of each vehicle and the spanning trees are refreshed for every location-based request to avoid keeping these information. Regardless of the demanded service providers are found or not, each location-based request is replied by the corresponding leader vehicle accordingly within a short time slot. Compared with the classical Vehicular Information Transfer Protocol (VITP), the performances of DLSDP are much better both in success rate and average response latency for requests.