Abstract
Vehicle location information is central to many location-based services and applications in VANETs. Tracking vehicles positions and maintaining an accurate up-to-date view of the entire network are not easy due to the high mobility of vehicles and consequently rapid topology changes. The design of a scalable, accurate, and efficient location service is still a very challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a lightweight hierarchical cluster-based location service in city environments (HCBLS). HCBLS integrates a logical clustering based on the city digital map and consequently does not involve extra signaling overhead. An advanced location update aggregation at different levels of the assumed hierarchy is adopted to maintain up-to-date and accurate location information. Simulation results show that HCBLS achieves much better performances than the Efficient Map-Based Location Service (EMBLS) and any regular (non-cluster-based) updating scheme. HCBLS increases the success rate by around 10%, improves the overview of the network by more than 30%, lowers the location update and query costs by more than 7 times, lowers the message delivery latency by around 3 times, and presents around 4 times better localization accuracy.
Highlights
The automobile industry is experiencing an unprecedented shift: vehicles are no more seen just as a mean of transportation but they are considered as computers on wheels [1,2,3,4]
The above analysis of the penetration rate of Road Side Unit (RSU) and its impact on the considered performance metrics clearly show that our proposed Hybrid ClusterBased Location Service (HCBLS) delivers good results even when the penetration rate decreases to 60%
For a penetration rate higher than 60%, the average overhead is almost equal to that obtained by a full penetration rate, the measured success rate exceeds 82%, the percentage of vehicles stored in the RSUs exceeds 82%, and the localization error is lower than 8 m
Summary
The automobile industry is experiencing an unprecedented shift: vehicles are no more seen just as a mean of transportation but they are considered as computers on wheels [1,2,3,4]. We design an efficient hierarchical clusterbased location service for the urban environment requiring no extra overhead. It relies on a very limited number of location servers to efficiently provide location updates and queries. Selected cluster heads are responsible of feeding the location servers with vehicles current positions. Obtained results show that we have an accurate overview of the vehicles circulating throughout the simulated region, yet the required signaling overhead is very low compared to that needed by the Efficient Map-Based Location Service (EMBLS) [22] and the Hybrid Location Service (HLS). HLS is a variant of HCBLS where the location update mechanism is performed directly to the nearest Road Side Unit (RSU) without clustering.
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