Hybrid location management in vehicular city environments

Abstract

Unicast geo-routing protocols are reliant on a robust location service protocol to successfully seek the destination vehicle’s location. Furthermore successful V2X communication is reliant on the geo-routing protocol to successfully deliver the packet. In both cases successful packet delivery and robustness of the protocols is paramount, the failure of either renders communication a failure. In order to maximise packet delivery, this paper proposes a framework comprised of a location service, the Urban Vehicular Location Service (UVLS), and a geo-routing scheme, the Infrastructure Enhanced Geo-Routing Protocol (IEGRP), that exploits infrastructure where available to function in completely distributed, partially connected and fully infrastructure based networks. Unlike previous protocols that are typically fully distributed or centralised only, the proposed protocols are designed and evaluated to operate in a heterogeneous vehicular environment, specifically to maximise packet delivery and query resolution.