An Efficient Fault Tolerant Location Based Service Discovery Protocol for Vehicular Networks

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 feature into these mechanisms. This feature is 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. In this paper, we present a 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. We present our fault tolerant protocol, and report on its performance evaluation. Our simulation experiments show that our proposed fault tolerant LocVSDP algorithm improves the success rate significantly over the basic LocVSDP. In fact, the success rate is improved in the roadside routers failures scenario and in the links failures scenarios by 50 percent and 30 percent respectively.