Towards a balanced and reliable localization of services in heterogeneous vehicular ad hoc networks

Abstract

Recent studies on service discovery protocols in vehicular networks have shown promising results. However, very little work has been reported on how to integrate the fault tolerance and QoS features into service discovery protocols. These features are vital for the success of the deployment of service discovery protocols in vehicular networks. Drivers on their cars should not have their requests dissatisfied or their connections dropped because a service provider or some components between the service provider and the service requester have failed. Moreover, it is very important to provide users with services that suit better to their requests while balancing the load on service providers. In addition, for a service discovery protocol integrated with routing protocols, it is important to guarantee load balancing on routing paths between service providers and service requesters. In this paper, we present a QoS and fault tolerant location based service discovery protocol for vehicular networks. The main advantages of our protocol is its ability to tolerate service providers failure, communication links failure and roadside routers failure. Moreover, our protocol guarantees load balancing on service providers, and routing paths between service providers and service requesters. It permits also to choose service providers and routing paths between service providers and service requesters that satisfy some performance attributes specified by service requesters. We present our fault tolerance and QoS based service discovery protocol in vehicular networks, and report on its performance evaluation. Our simulation experiments show that our proposed QoS and fault tolerant based location based service discovery algorithm improves the success and connection rates significantly over the original LocVSDP.