Intersection location service and performance comparison of three location service algorithms for vehicular ad hoc networks in city environments

Most research results of location services have been focused on nodes whose motions follow patterns of random waypoints. For inter-vehicular communications that happen in metropolitan areas, moving cars obviously travel on restricted directions along streets and make frequent stops over intersections. In this paper, we present intersection location service (ILS), a distributed hashing-based location service algorithm that makes use of the features of street intersections and the Chord algorithm as the location query and fault tolerant mechanism. Performance comparisons of ILS with two previous well known location service algorithms, grid location service (GLS) and hierarchical location service (HLS) are demonstrated in the ns-2 simulations of moving cars in various city environments. We have shown by means of simulation that ILS achieves good results in terms of query success ratios and remarkable scalability with respect to network size.